Take labels and fix the standard normalization in which the squared weight penalty has coefficient . The squared-slack support vector machine, a form of soft-margin support vector machine, has primal problem
The slack variables of a support vector machine permit margin violations. Penalizing favors a wide support-vector-machine margin, while sets the cost of the violations. The intercept is unpenalized, and the resulting classifier is , with a fixed choice at zero. The square on is essential to the Lagrangian dual problem below.