A Practical Guide to using Support Vector Machines

This month we are delighted to have Professor Paul Walsh from CIT speaking at Cork AI. The talk will introduce Support vector machines (SVMs), which are supervised machine learning algorithms that are widely used for a range of real word problems. Key terms and concepts will be described and it will be shown how SVM algorithms can build linear and complex models that can accurately classify unseen data.

In order to get the best machine learning performance, the tuning and evaluation of SVMs will also be demonstrated. Live demos and hands on coding opportunities will be provided and a real-world application will be show-cased. The R programming language (https://www.r-project.org/) and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics will be used along with some JavaScript.

Prof. Paul Walsh is an experienced machine learning technology expert having published over 80 articles and book chapters on the topic. He has widely consulted with industry on the topic and has founded several start-ups, including life science software company www.nsilico.com, which uses machine learning to analyse genomic and biomedical data. He is principal investigator for major national and international research programs including SFI and H2020. He has a PhD in computer science and is a certified technology and project management professional with experience in consultancy for major international clients.