Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 205 5 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
For and labels , with squared-norm penalty normalized as , the kernel soft-margin support vector machine solvesHere is the hinge loss building block, and is column of the symmetric kernel matrix. The prediction iswith a fixed class choice, for example , when the score is zero. Other positive rescalings of the penalty change numerical coefficients in the optimality equation but not the zero-coefficient conclusion.
For a finite convex function , its subdifferential at isFor , affine composition preserves the defining convexity inequality: for ,If , the subgradient inequality gives , proving .
Conversely, let and first suppose . For every , the function is constant along . Applying the subgradient inequality for both signs of shows . Thus is in the span of , or with . Substituting gives for every real . Hence . If , is constant and ; since finite convex on all of has a nonempty subdifferential at , as well. This handles the case in which the suggested orthogonal projection would be undefined. ThereforeThis proves the subdifferential under scalar affine composition identity with all its degenerate cases.
Let be a fitted support-vector-machine margin. The subdifferential of the hinge loss yields choicesApplying the affine-composition identity and the subdifferential sum rule to the convex objective, its optimum satisfiesThe second equation is the intercept condition. Since is invertible, multiplying the first by gives the kernel support-vector coefficient from hinge activity formulaIn particular Invertibility is needed for this statement about the chosen coefficients: for with two positive labels, and give zero objective and both margins equal to two, while both coefficients are nonzero. A singular kernel matrix allows coefficient changes in the null space without changing the fitted function.
At prediction time, the sum can omit all zero coefficients, requiring only the number of evaluations of the positive-definite kernel corresponding to retained support vectors rather than all . This need not remove the cost of forming or solving with a dense training kernel matrix. Every misclassified point has , including a score-zero tie assigned to the opposite class, so and . Thus many classification errors imply many active support vectors and little prediction-time sparsity benefit. Correctly classified points inside the unit margin can also have nonzero coefficients; a point exactly on the margin need not have a nonzero coefficient.