The Chosen Few

In a trained soft-margin SVM, which training points end up as support vectors, i.e., the only points with nonzero dual coefficients that actually determine the decision boundary?

A

All training points contribute equally regardless of their position relative to the boundary

B

Only points the model misclassifies; correctly classified points never count as support vectors

C

Points lying exactly on the margin boundary, plus points that violate the margin (inside it or misclassified, ξi>0\xi_i > 0)

D

Only points strictly outside the margin on the correct side of the boundary

E

Only the points closest to each class's centroid (mean feature vector)