python - plot decision boundary matplotlib

Question

I am very new to matplotlib and am working on simple projects to get acquainted with it. I was wondering how I might plot the decision boundary which is the weight vector of the form [w1,w2], which basically separates the two classes lets say C1 and C2, using matplotlib.

Is it as simple as plotting a line from (0,0) to the point (w1,w2) (since W is the weight "vector") if so, how do I extend this like in both directions if I need to?

Right now all I am doing is :

 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
   plt.plot([0,w1],[0,w2])
   plt.show()

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Decision boundary is generally much more complex then just a line, and so (in 2d dimensional case) it is better to use the code for generic case, which will also work well with linear classifiers. The simplest idea is to plot contour plot of the decision function

# X - some data in 2dimensional np.array

x_min, x_max = X[:, 0].min() - 1, X[:, 0].max() + 1
y_min, y_max = X[:, 1].min() - 1, X[:, 1].max() + 1
xx, yy = np.meshgrid(np.arange(x_min, x_max, h),
                     np.arange(y_min, y_max, h))

# here "model" is your model's prediction (classification) function
Z = model(np.c_[xx.ravel(), yy.ravel()]) 

# Put the result into a color plot
Z = Z.reshape(xx.shape)
plt.contourf(xx, yy, Z, cmap=pl.cm.Paired)
plt.axis('off')

# Plot also the training points
plt.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], c=Y, cmap=pl.cm.Paired)

some examples from sklearn documentation