About the Author

Alexandre Kowalczyk is a software developer at ABC Arbitrage, a financial company doing automated trading on the stock market, and a certified Microsoft Specialist in C#.

Alexandre first encountered Support Vector Machines (SVMs) while attending the Andrew Ng online course on Machine Learning three years ago. Since then, he has successfully used SVMs on several projects, including real-time news classification.

In his spare time, he participates in Kaggle contests. He has used SVM implementations in C#, R, and Python to classify plankton images, Greek news, and products into categories, and to predict physical and chemical properties of soil using spectral measurements.

Alexandre has spent two years studying SVMs, allowing him to understand how they work. Because it was difficult to find a simple overview of the subject, he started the blog SVM Tutorial, where he explains SVMs as simply as he can.

He hopes this book will help you understand SVMs and provide you with another tool in your machine-learning toolbox.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Syncfusion for providing me the opportunity to write this book, Grégory Godin for taking the time to read and review it, and James McCaffrey for his in-depth technical review.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my mother, Claudine Kowalczyk (1954–2003).