Error using e1071 svm: NA/NaN/Inf in foreign function call

My mistake.

I am sending the ImageBeforeError.RData file.

No, no, no! Please the read the posting guide and please read the
answers that were posted for you. As you obviously did not do that, let
me read it to you again:
  <Z>
  Wouldn't it be possible to simply use a data set that is already
  available in R, *please*?
  </Z>
The solution is definitely not to send a huge data file (6.5M) to
those who offered advice and to the subsribers of R-help (where it does
not get through anyway, I think). If it is really data-dependent, then
you might post the data on the web, but even then it is not very helpful
to post a file in which there are dozens of objects when all you need is
a data frame.

To reproduce the error you must load the file and then to do:

library("e1071")
model <- do.call(learner,learner.pars)

I am using nu = 0.7. At this moment I do not get an error but the svm 
function blocks. It was al that night running without results.

So there is no error as you claim above (and as you claimed in your
previous mail). This is just to report the fact, that your computations
are still running.

Let me provide a simple reproducible example which does not involve
spamming R-helpers with .RData files.
You seem to want to report that the svm

set.seed(1071)
y <- rnorm(100)
x1 <- rnorm(100)
x2 <- rnorm(100)
svm(y ~ x1 + x2)

can be fitted very quickly whereas

svm(y ~ x1 + x2, cost = 4096, kernel = "polynomial", degree = 4)

takes much longer. The decisive parameter here is the cost parameter
which is unusually large. I'm not sure why the algorithm gets so slow,
but you might also want to check whether a cost parameter of the
magnitude is appropriate. The other parameter which is important is the
degree of the polynomial kernel, in which the complexity is also
increasing.

So the message is: Be careful in the selection of the hyperparameters of
the SVM. Maybe someone else on the list can provide more insight on
guidelines for choosing the hyperparameters of a polynomial kernel SVM.
Z

Using
other kernels it used to finish in a few seconds. I have done already
thousands of tests with other kernels. Only with the polynomial one I
am not able to get results.

Thanks for any help.

Joao
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Achim Zeileis" <Achim.Zeileis at wu-wien.ac.at>
To: "Jo??o Mendes Moreira" <jmoreira at fe.up.pt>
Cc: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: [R] Error using e1071 svm: NA/NaN/Inf in foreign function
call

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 15:46:20 +0100 Jo??o Mendes Moreira wrote:

Hello,

As far I saw in archive mailing list, I am not the first person

with> this problem. Anyway I was not able to pass this error once the

information I got from the archive it is not very conclusive for

this> case. I have used linear, radial and sigmoid kernels for the
same data> in the same conditions and everything is ok.  This problem
just> happens with the polynomial kernel. I send the debuging result
from a> reproducible example. The error message is at the end.

I receive a different error message:
 Error in eval(expr, envir, enclos) : Object "Fim" not found
So much for the reproducibility... Wouldn't it be possible to simply
use a data set that is already available in R, *please*?

Anyways, it seems that your specification of `nu' causes the
problem: 0 might be a little bit too small.
Z