This example demonstrates a one-class SVM classifier; it's about as simple as possible while still showing the complete LIBSVM workflow.

Step 1: Import NumPy & LIBSVM

  import numpy as NP
    from svm import *

Step 2: Generate synthetic data: for this example, 500 points within a given boundary (note: quite a few real data sets are are provided on the LIBSVM website)

Data = NP.random.randint(-5, 5, 1000).reshape(500, 2)

Step 3: Now, choose some non-linear decision boundary for a one-class classifier:

rx = [ (x**2 + y**2) < 9 and 1 or 0 for (x, y) in Data ]

Step 4: Next, arbitrarily partition the data w/r/t this decision boundary:

• Class I: those that lie on or within an arbitrary circle

• Class II: all points outside the decision boundary (circle)

The SVM Model Building begins here; all steps before this one were just to prepare some synthetic data.

Step 5: Construct the problem description by calling svm_problem, passing in the decision boundary function and the data, then bind this result to a variable.

px = svm_problem(rx, Data)

Step 6: Select a kernel function for the non-linear mapping

For this exmaple, i chose RBF (radial basis function) as my kernel function

pm = svm_parameter(kernel_type=RBF)

Step 7: Train the classifier, by calling svm_model, passing in the problem description (px) & kernel (pm)

v = svm_model(px, pm)

Step 8: Finally, test the trained classifier by calling predict on the trained model object ('v')

v.predict([3, 1])
# returns the class label (either '1' or '0')

For the example above, I used version 3.0 of LIBSVM (the current stable release at the time this answer was posted).

Finally, w/r/t the part of your question regarding the choice of kernel function, Support Vector Machines are not specific to a particular kernel function--e.g., i could have chosen a different kernel (gaussian, polynomial, etc.).

LIBSVM includes all of the most commonly used kernel functions--which is a big help because you can see all plausible alternatives and to select one for use in your model, is just a matter of calling svm_parameter and passing in a value for kernel_type (a three-letter abbreviation for the chosen kernel).

Finally, the kernel function you choose for training must match the kernel function used against the testing data.

I think you might be approaching this the wrong way. You seem to be expecting to use LIBSVM as if it was ls: just do man ls to get the parameters and view the results. SVMs are more complicated than that.

The authors of LIBSVM publish a document (not a scientific paper!) called: A Practical Guide to Support Vector Classification. You need to read and understand all that the authors explain there. The appendix to that guide gives multiple examples on many datasets and how to train and how to search for parameters (all things that are very important).

There is a README file in the python directory of the LIBSVM distribution. If you understand python and you read the practical guide you should be able to use it. If not you should probably start from the command line examples to learn SVM or start with somthing easier(not SVMs!) to learn python. After reading and understanding that you should be able to read use all the examples from the appendix and invoke them from python.

Once you've tried this you should be up and running in no time. If not, this is a great place to ask specific questions about problems you run into.

I echo the comment of @MarcoPashkov but will try to elaborate on the LibSVM file format. I find the documentation comprehensive yet hard to find, for the Python lib I recommend the README on GitHub.

An important piece to recognize is that there is a Sparse format where all features which are 0 get removed and a Dense format where features which are 0 are not removed. These two are equivalent examples of each taken from the README.

# Dense data
>>> y, x = [1,-1], [[1,0,1], [-1,0,-1]]
# Sparse data
>>> y, x = [1,-1], [{1:1, 3:1}, {1:-1,3:-1}]

The y variable stores a list of all the categories for the data.

The x variable stores the feature vector.

assert len(y) == len(x), "Both lists should be the same length"

The format found in the Heart Scale Example is a Sparse format where the dictionary key is the feature index and the dictionary value is the feature value while the first value is the category.

The Sparse format is incredibly useful while using a Bag of Words Representation for your feature vector.

As most documents will typically use a very small subset of the words used in the corpus, the resulting matrix will have many feature values that are zeros (typically more than 99% of them).

For instance a collection of 10,000 short text documents (such as emails) will use a vocabulary with a size in the order of 100,000 unique words in total while each document will use 100 to 1000 unique words individually.

For an example using the feature vector you started with, I trained a basic LibSVM 3.20 model. This code isn't meant to be used but may help in showing how to create and test a model.

from collections import namedtuple
# Using namedtuples for descriptive purposes, in actual code a normal tuple would work fine.
Category = namedtuple("Category", ["index", "name"])
Feature = namedtuple("Feature", ["category_index", "distance_from_beginning", "distance_from_end", "contains_digit", "capitalized"])

# Separate up the set of categories, libsvm requires a numerical index so we associate each with an index.
categories = dict()
for index, name in enumerate("B M C S NA".split(' ')):
    # LibSVM expects index to start at 1, not 0.
    categories[name] = Category(index + 1, name)
categories

Out[0]: {'B': Category(index=1, name='B'),
   'C': Category(index=3, name='C'),
   'M': Category(index=2, name='M'),
   'NA': Category(index=5, name='NA'),
   'S': Category(index=4, name='S')}

# Faked set of CSV input for example purposes.
csv_input_lines = """category_index,distance_from_beginning,distance_from_end,contains_digit,capitalized
B,1,10,1,0
M,10,1,0,1
C,2,3,0,1
S,23,2,0,0
NA,12,0,0,1""".split("\n")
# We just ignore the header.
header = csv_input_lines[0]

# A list of Feature namedtuples, this will be trained as lists.
features = list()
for line in csv_input_lines[1:]:
    split_values = line.split(',')
    # Create a Feature with the values converted to integers.
    features.append(Feature(categories[split_values[0]].index, *map(int, split_values[1:])))

features

Out[1]: [Feature(category_index=1, distance_from_beginning=1, distance_from_end=10, contains_digit=1, capitalized=0),
 Feature(category_index=2, distance_from_beginning=10, distance_from_end=1, contains_digit=0, capitalized=1),
 Feature(category_index=3, distance_from_beginning=2, distance_from_end=3, contains_digit=0, capitalized=1),
 Feature(category_index=4, distance_from_beginning=23, distance_from_end=2, contains_digit=0, capitalized=0),
 Feature(category_index=5, distance_from_beginning=12, distance_from_end=0, contains_digit=0, capitalized=1)]

# Y is the category index used in training for each Feature. Now it is an array (order important) of all the trained indexes.
y = map(lambda f: f.category_index, features)
# X is the feature vector, for this we convert all the named tuple's values except the category which is at index 0.
x = map(lambda f: list(f)[1:], features)

from svmutil import svm_parameter, svm_problem, svm_train, svm_predict
# Barebones defaults for SVM
param = svm_parameter()
# The (Y,X) parameters should be the train dataset.
prob = svm_problem(y, x)
model=svm_train(prob, param)

# For actual accuracy checking, the (Y,X) parameters should be the test dataset.
p_labels, p_acc, p_vals = svm_predict(y, x, model)

Out[3]: Accuracy = 100% (5/5) (classification)

I hope this example helps, it shouldn't be used for your training. It is meant as an example only because it is inefficient.

Seems like a old thread. Hope it helps someone else in the future.

I had the same problem. The solution is

1. Run make in libsvm-3.0 directory
2. Run make in libsvm-3.0/python directory

If you did only at libsvm-3.0 folder you will face this issue. Do it at both the folders. Then it will work fine.