# What are support values in a support vector machine?

I started reading up on SVM and very little is defined of what are support values. I reckon it's they are denoted as $$\alpha$$ in most formulations.

• Maybe you should provide some context, for example, the formula you're referring to and the links to the article(s) you're reading (although, in this case, it should not be necessary, but still).
– nbro
Jan 5 at 19:39
• Hello! Welcome to AI.SE. Support vectors are basically an alternative view of SVMs. We view the data points as vectors and weighing them by $\alpha_i$'s will give us the classifier (this is called the representer theorem). Using this we can develop intersting theories about SVM. Also the $\alpha$ is the same as the one that comes up in the Lagarngian, this set of $\alpha_i$'s will act as the solution of your dual problem (a term you have to solve in a convex optimization problem).I cannot elaborate more as this requires some knowledge about linear algebra and optimization.But this is the idea.
– user9947
Jan 6 at 19:36
• Don't think too much of it if you are just trying to implement SVMs but if you are researching about SVM you have to take graduate level Linear Algebra and Convex optimization course to undersatnd this.
– user9947
Jan 6 at 19:40

In the least-squares SVM (LS-SVM) the non-zero Lagrange multipliers ($$\alpha$$) are the support values. The corresponding data points are the support vectors. Johan Suykens explains this in Least Squares Support Vector Machines.