Support vector machines in engineering: An overview

This paper provides an overview of the support vector machine (SVM) methodology and its applicability to real‐world engineering problems. Specifically, the aim of this study is to review the current state of the SVM technique, and to show some of its latest successful results in real‐world problems present in different engineering fields. The paper starts by reviewing the main basic concepts of SVMs and kernel methods. Kernel theory, SVMs, support vector regression (SVR), and SVM in signal processing and hybridization of SVMs with meta‐heuristics are fully described in the first part of this paper. The adoption of SVMs in engineering is nowadays a fact. As we illustrate in this paper, SVMs can handle high‐dimensional, heterogeneous and scarcely labeled datasets very efficiently, and it can be also successfully tailored to particular applications. The second part of this review is devoted to different case studies in engineering problems, where the application of the SVM methodology has led to excellent results. First, we discuss the application of SVR algorithms in two renewable energy problems: the wind speed prediction from measurements in neighbor stations and the wind speed reconstruction using synoptic‐pressure data. The application of SVMs in noninvasive cardiac indices estimation is described next, and results obtained there are presented. The application of SVMs in problems of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data processing is further discussed in the paper: brain decoding and mental disorder characterization. The following application deals with antenna array processing, namely SVMs for spatial nonlinear beamforming, and the SVM application in a problem of arrival angle detection. Finally, the application of SVMs to remote sensing image classification and target detection problems closes this review.