Characterization of the Sonar Signals Benchmark

Abstract

We study the classification of sonar targets first introduced by Gorman & Sejnowski (1988). We discovered that not only the training set and the test set of this benchmark are both linearly separable, although by different hyperplanes, but that the complete set of patterns, training and test patterns together, is also linearly separable. The distances of the patterns to the separating hyperplane determined by learning with the training set alone, and to the one determined by learning the complete data set, are presented.