I was shocked to see a student's report on performance comparisons between support vector machines (SVMs) and fuzzy classi?ers that we had developed withourbestendeavors.Classi?cationperformanceofourfuzzyclassi?erswas comparable, but in most cases inferior, to that of support vector machines. This tendency was especially evident when the numbers of class data were small. I shifted my research e?orts from developing fuzzy classi?ers with high generalization ability to developing support vector machine–based classi?ers. This book focuses on the application of support vector machines to p- tern classi?cation. Speci?cally, we discuss the properties of support vector machines that are useful for pattern classi?cation applications, several m- ticlass models, and variants of support vector machines. To clarify their - plicability to real-world problems, we compare performance of most models discussed in the book using real-world benchmark data. Readers interested in the theoretical aspect of support vector machines should refer to books such as [109, 215, 256, 257].