What does this error mean? I thought the argument was double

>> svmStruct = svmtrain(m,groups,'ShowPlot',true);
Undefined function 'svmtrain' for input arguments of type 'double'.

[Geoff Hayes]

Typically, this error is raised when the function or command cannot be found (in the MATLAB path) or is undefined (doesn't exist).

I think that svmtrain belongs to the Statistics Toolbox ( http://www.mathworks.com/help/stats/svmtrain.html). Do you have it? Type ver in the Command Window to see what toolboxes you have.

[the cyclist]

Are you able to post the smallest possible snippet of code that will exhibit the error?

[Habibu]

Thanks Geoff but have statistics Toolbox installed. I reconfirmed by executing ver.

[Habibu]

my code.

datsig1 = [2551        1973;
          2816        2887;
          7070        6897;
          2873        2979;
          2588        2675;
          1712        2274;
           909        4859;
           792        4914;
          1823        7162;
           878        5039;
           885        5534]

groups=[1;1;1;1;1;1;0;0;0;0;0];

cl = svmtrain(datsig1,groups);

Then i get error Undefined function 'svmtrain' for input arguments of type 'double'.

[Geoff Hayes]

Habibu - I get the same error (as the above) since I don't have the Statistics Toolbox. As the cyclist asks below, what does which svmtrain return?

[Habibu]

Geoff, I have statistics toolbox as part of student license. I have fixed it the issue was related to license.

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

The code you posted in the comment worked without error for me.

What do you get if you type

which svmtrain

?

[Habibu]

Undefined function or variable 'svmtrain'.

[José-Luis]

This might mean that your version of the statistics toolbox is old and does not have the svmtrain() function.

[the cyclist]

I'm guessing that that is the answer. On my machine (a Mac), it is

/Applications/MATLAB_R2014a.app/toolbox/stats/stats/svmtrain.m

From peeking at this page of old Release notes, it looks to me that SVM was introduced into the Statistics Toolbox in version 2013a (and was formerly in the Bioinformatics Toolbox).

[Habibu]

Thanks guys it was license issues. MATLAB was pointing to coursera MATLAB license instead of my student license. I did the following to get it fixed. 1) uninstalled MATLAB 2) deleted all files related to MATLAB. 3) restarted my laptop 4) re-installed MATLAB

Once again thanks for your continued help.

Answer 2

[Nguyen Duc Duy]

Maybe you need to change the function.

Machine Learning

svmtrain and svmclassify have been removed

The svmtrain and svmclassify functions have been removed. Use the fitcsvm function and the predict function of ClassificationSVM instead.

To update your code, replace all instances of svmtrain with fitcsvm, and replace all instances of svmclassify with predict. For more details, see the Compatibility Considerations sections of svmtrain and svmclassify.

[Rik]

Since this question was posted in 2014, I doubt this was the sollution back then.