SVM, Support Vector Machine, is something that has similar roots with neural networks. But recently it has been widely used in Classification . That means, if I have some sets of things classified (But you know nothing about HOW I CLASSIFIED THEM, or say you don't know the rules used for classification), when a new data comes, SVM can PREDICT which set it should belong to. Reference: SVMs piaip's Using (lib)SVM Tutorial Dr CJLin Kernel-Machines.Org