  A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs)
using the latent variable representation on Polson & Scott (2012) is presented.
This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated
with classical SVMs including automatic penalty parameter selection, the
ability to handle dependent samples, missing data and variable selection. We
demonstrate on simulated and real datasets that our approach is easily
extendable to non-standard situations and outperforms the classical SVM
approach whilst remaining computationally efficient.
