# Why does the SVM margin is $\frac{2}{\|\mathbf{w}\|}$

I am reading the Wikipedia article about Support Vector Machine and I don't understand how they compute the distance between two hyperplanes.

In the article,

By using geometry, we find the distance between these two hyperplanes is $\frac{2}{\|\mathbf{w}\|}$

I don't understand how the find that result.

## What I tried

I tried setting up an example in two dimensions with an hyperplane having the equation $y = -2x+5$ and separating some points $A(2,0)$, $B(3,0)$ and $C(0,4)$, $D(0,6)$ .

If I take a vector $\mathbf{w}(-2,-1)$ normal to that hyperplane and compute the margin with $\frac{2}{\|\mathbf{w}\|}$ I get $\frac{2}{\sqrt{5}}$ when in my example the margin is equal to 2 (distance between $C$ and $D$).

How did they come up with $\frac{2}{\|\mathbf{w}\|}$ ?

• You mean $y=-2x+5$, it seems. And the margin is probably related to the maximum distance between two parallel hyperplanes that can separate the two point sets; it is not a distance between points of the datasets. – ccorn May 30 '15 at 23:42
• @ccom Thanks I corrected the formula. Yes but the two points of the dataset I choose are on the parallel hyperplanes so it should be the same I think. – Octoplus May 31 '15 at 12:05
• I found out my error. I was using two points but the line passing though them is not perpendicular to the hyperplane. – Octoplus May 31 '15 at 13:31

Let $\textbf{x}_0$ be a point in the hyperplane $\textbf{wx} - b = -1$, i.e., $\textbf{wx}_0 - b = -1$. To measure the distance between hyperplanes $\textbf{wx}-b=-1$ and $\textbf{wx}-b=1$, we only need to compute the perpendicular distance from $\textbf{x}_0$ to plane $\textbf{wx}-b=1$, denoted as $r$.
Note that $\frac{\textbf{w}}{\|\textbf{w}\|}$ is a unit normal vector of the hyperplane $\textbf{wx}-b=1$. We have $$\textbf{w}(\textbf{x}_0 + r\frac{\textbf{w}}{\|\textbf{w}\|}) - b = 1$$ since $\textbf{x}_0 + r\frac{\textbf{w}}{\|\textbf{w}\|}$ should be a point in hyperplane $\textbf{wx}-b = 1$ according to our definition of $r$.