In machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

 the margin of a single data point is defined to be the distance from the data point to a decision boundary

Decision boundary

In a statistical-classification problem with two classes, a decision boundary or decision surface is a hypersurface that partitions the underlying vector space into two sets, one for each class...

. Note that there are many distances and decision boundaries that may be appropriate for certain datasets and goals. A margin classifier

Margin classifier

In machine learning, a margin classifer is a classifier which is able to give an associated distance from the decision boundary for each example. For instance, if a linear classifier In machine learning, a margin classifer is a classifier which is able to give an associated distance from the...

 is a classifier that explicitly utilizes the margin of each example while learning a classifier

Classifier

Classifier may refer to:*Classifier *Classifier *Classifier *Hierarchical classifier*Linear classifier...

. There are theoretical justifications (based on the VC dimension

VC dimension

In statistical learning theory, or sometimes computational learning theory, the VC dimension is a measure of the capacity of a statistical classification algorithm, defined as the cardinality of the largest set of points that the algorithm can shatter...

) as to why maximizing the margin (under some suitable constraints) may be beneficial for machine learning and statistical inferences algorithms.