  We study the typical learning properties of the recently introduced Soft
Margin Classifiers (SMCs), learning realizable and unrealizable tasks, with the
tools of Statistical Mechanics. We derive analytically the behaviour of the
learning curves in the regime of very large training sets. We obtain
exponential and power laws for the decay of the generalization error towards
the asymptotic value, depending on the task and on general characteristics of
the distribution of stabilities of the patterns to be learned. The optimal
learning curves of the SMCs, which give the minimal generalization error, are
obtained by tuning the coefficient controlling the trade-off between the error
and the regularization terms in the cost function. If the task is realizable by
the SMC, the optimal performance is better than that of a hard margin Support
Vector Machine and is very close to that of a Bayesian classifier.
