title: Is TF-IDF necessary when using SVM?
body: <p>I'm using Support Vector Machines to classify phrases. Before using the SVM, I understand I should do some kind of normalization on the phrase-vectors. One popular method is TF-IDF.</p>
  
  <p>The terms with the highest TF-IDF score are often the terms that best characterize the topic of the document.</p>
  
  <p>But isn't that exactly what SVM does anyway? Giving the highest weight to the terms that best characterize the document?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance :-)</p>