Q1 Quadratic Programming
 

From that well known source, wikipedia:

Quadratic programming (QP) is a special type of mathematical optimization problem. It is the problem of optimizing (minimizing or maximizing) a quadratic function of several variables subject to linear constraints on these variables.

The hard-margin SVM problem is to minimize 0.5w'w subject to (yn(w'xn + b) >= 1.

So is this a quadratic programming problem?

Re: Q1 Quadratic Programming
 

A quadratic function of a set of variables is a linear combination of constants and products of one or two of the variables (including squares of them).

A linear constraint is an inequality which only contains a linear combination of constants and individual variables.

How do these relate to your description of the hard margin SVM problem? (The variables are the components of )

Re: Q1 Quadratic Programming
 

Well, the problem was to minimize wrt w and b the value w'w (which is a combination of 2 values of our variable) subject to yn(w'xn + b) >= 1 where yn and xn are constants (our training data) i.e. a linear combination of our variable w.

So, the original problem for hard-margin SVM seems like a "quadratic programming" problem - so my real question is this: why do we do the "dual" mapping to get the problem stated in terms of alpha? Is this purely to get it into a more convenient form for QP packages? I am missing something, but I don't know what :-).

Re: Q1 Quadratic Programming
 

If I understand correctly, the motivation is that it is often computationally efficient to do so.

Re: Q1 Quadratic Programming
 

The number of variables in the original problem depends on the dimensionality of the weight space, whereas the number of variables in the dual problem does not. This makes a difference if that dimensionality is high, which is often the case in nonlinear transforms.

Re: Q1 Quadratic Programming
 

Thank you Professor! I understand now!