Using Scikit-learn, How Do I Learn A SVM Over A Small Data Set?

With scikit-learn, I have built a support vector machine, for a basic handwritten digit detection problem. My total data set consists of 235 observations. My observations consist

Solution 1:

This is exactly what cross validation (and its generalizations, like Err^0.632) is for. Hold-out set is reasonable only with huge quantities of data.