We are searching for the model that minimises a loss (the norm of the
vector of differences between predictions and true targets) with a
penalty/regularization term (the norm of the vector of weights). l1 and l2
are types of vector norm: l1 refers to the sum of the absolute values of a
vector; l2 refers to the square-root of the sum-of-squares of a vector.

The penalty term accounts for our belief that not all features are equally
predictive of the target. In particular, l1 regularization (also known as
the Lasso) has a tendency to select models where some features have zero
weight (effectively, a form of feature selection). The extent of the
penalty is determined by a parameter C in this case (and by its reciprocal,
alpha, in other scikit-learn estimators), and you can see some examples of
this induced model sparsity at
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/linear_model/plot_logistic_l1_l2_sparsity.html
and
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/linear_model/plot_lasso_and_elasticnet.html
.

This is knowledge you should be able to obtain from almost any machine
learning course or textbook, and you should almost certainly be asking it
on a wider forum than scikit-learn's mailing list, such as
stats.stackexchange.com.



On 15 August 2014 04:15, Pagliari, Roberto <[email protected]> wrote:

> Can someone, please, expand on this comment from the documentation (
> http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/svm.html#tips-on-practical-use):
>
>
>
> ·         Using L1 penalization as provided by LinearSVC(loss='l2',
> penalty='l1', dual=False) yields a sparse solution, i.e. only a subset of
> feature weights is different from zero and contribute to the decision
> function. Increasing C yields a more complex model (more feature are
> selected). The C value that yields a “null” model (all weights equal to
> zero) can be calculated using *l1_min_c*
> <http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.svm.l1_min_c.html#sklearn.svm.l1_min_c>
> .
>
>
>
> Why is the number of features reduced?
>
>
>
> Thank you,
>
>
>
>
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