Ananda Das explains how linear Support Vector Machines work in classifying spam messages:
Linear SVM assumes that the two classes are linearly separable that is a hyper-plane can separate out the two classes and the data points from the two classes do not get mixed up. Of course this is not an ideal assumption and how we will discuss it later how linear SVM works out the case of non-linear separability. But for a reader with some experience here I pose a question which is like this Linear SVM creates a discriminant function but so does LDA. Yet, both are different classifiers. Why ? (Hint: LDA is based on Bayes Theorem while Linear SVM is based on the concept of margin. In case of LDA, one has to make an assumption on the distribution of the data per class. For a newbie, please ignore the question. We will discuss this point in details in some other post.)
This is a pretty math-heavy post, so get your coffee first. h/t R-Bloggers.