In our experiments, support vector machines (SVMs)
(Vapnik 1995; Cortes and Vapnik 1995; Burges 1998) were
used to model and classify each subject. Being a powerful
supervised learning method, SVM is especially suitable for
classification tasks. In its basic form, given two classes of patterns (typically described as ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘negative’’)
for training, this technique basically finds the hyperplane
that ‘‘optimally’’ discriminates between these two classes.