What are the differences between SVC, NuSVC, and LinearSVC?

Question

What are the differences between SVC, NuSVC, and LinearSVC?

Please shed some light.

Answer 1

In scikit SVC and nuSVC are mathematically equivalent with both methods based on the library libsvm. The main difference is that SVC uses the parameter C while nuSVC uses the parameter nu.

LinearSVC is based on the library liblinear. As the documentation says, LinearSVC is similar to SVC with parameter kernel='linear', but liblinear offers more penalties and loss functions in order to scale better with large numbers of samples. Please check out this question and this question for more details.