The document discusses support vector machines (SVMs). SVMs find the optimal separating hyperplane between classes that maximizes the margin between them. They can handle nonlinear data using kernels to map the data into higher dimensions where a linear separator may exist. Key aspects include defining the maximum margin hyperplane, using regularization and slack variables to deal with misclassified examples, and kernels which implicitly map data into other feature spaces without explicitly computing the transformations. The regularization and gamma parameters affect model complexity, with regularization controlling overfitting and gamma influencing the similarity between points.