OK. So I don't know that I can truly answer this question. If anyone who stumbles across this seems to know the answer, and would like to replace my pseudo-answer, then please leave a comment, and I will change my answer to a comment, and replace it with a better answer.

Ultimately I was just trying to arrive at the solution stated above in the original question. I have in fact reached a solution that works just fine:

Download and run pyvision included installer!

Open a terminal and paste the following line:

svn co https://pyvision.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pyvision/trunk pyvision

Once you've got it type:

cd pyvision/R/libsvm/python/
python setup.py install

And now you'll be able to open a terminal and type:

python
>>> import svmc
>>>

Voila! No errors, and libsvm hotness (Version 2.84, which should work fine in most situations--Please feel free to correct me!)

Thank you, and good luck to all my Macintosh OS X people out there! Michaux

First download and save svmutil.py file in the location where you are running your jupyter notebook. Then import svmutil functions using

from svmutil import *

You could be able to use its functionalities

svm_train()        : train an SVM model
svm_predict()      : predict testing data
svm_read_problem() : read the data from a LIBSVM-format file.
svm_load_model()   : load a LIBSVM model.
svm_save_model()   : save model to a file.
evaluations()      : evaluate prediction results.

The libsvm package from conda-forge channel provides only the shared library, and not the python bindings. If you want both, I'd suggest you do the following:

conda remove libsvm
conda install pip

Visit http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs and download the latest version of libsvm for your version of python and system architecture:

pip install /path/to/downloaded/libsvm-3.21-cp27-cp27m-win_amd64.whl

This wheel package contains the following files:

libsvm-3.21.data/data/Lib/site-packages/libsvm.dll
libsvm-3.21.data/data/Lib/site-packages/svm.py
libsvm-3.21.data/data/Lib/site-packages/svmutil.py
libsvm-3.21.dist-info/DESCRIPTION.rst
libsvm-3.21.dist-info/metadata.json
libsvm-3.21.dist-info/top_level.txt
libsvm-3.21.dist-info/WHEEL
libsvm-3.21.dist-info/METADATA
libsvm-3.21.dist-info/RECORD

Instead of going through libsvm in order to access it with Python (I installed libsvm through MacPorts, and import svmutil fails), you might want to install the popular scikit-learn package, which contains an optimized version of libsvm with Python bindings.

The install is very simple with MacPorts: sudo port install py27-scikit-learn (adapt py27 to whatever version of Python you use).

Given installation via make in .../libsvm-3.12/python,I think you also want:

>>> import svmutil

not:

>>> import svmulti