Please explain Support Vector Machines (SVM) like I am a 5 year old.
Comparing classifiers (is Kernel or SVM the best?)
There is no single best classificator. The art is finding the classificator with the right params that performs best on your given data.
"Kernel" is also no classificator, but a method to map lower dimensional data into higher dimensional space. It can be used with many classificators, including SVM.
SVMs usually perform well on small datasets, but get very computationally expensive with increasingly complex data. I had datasets where an SVM with polynomial kernel would train over a week on a bigger dataset. And our company has real high-end hardware.
There are also many more classificators, like Neural Networks, Random Forests, naive bayes etc.
And each of them has different variations with pros and cons each.
SVMs have the big advantage over other methods that they are pretty immune to overfitting on training data, that's why many people like them.
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