toy example in pattern recognition

Hi, In my homework, I must generate data (I think dataset) and apply it SVM, Gaussian Kernel, etc. And I must use "Toy example"

I search on it but unfortunately do not understand : what is toy example?

Is there any ready to use dataset related with it? or just generating random dataset with matlab? or something different? Thanks.

I add the only information in lecture note

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Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

"Toy example" means you must generate some sample random data of your own, then try to model it.

A "toy" is something that you play with, right? You are being asked to play with some data of your own construction, modeling it with the indicated tools. They have not given you a toy example, but told you to make one up.

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Admittedly it's confusing language. I don't think most native English speakers would use that language, but I think John is most likely right. It's some kind of arbitrary user-generated data that you make up.

However it could be that he supplied toy data for you in a file. For example it could be a table of the prices of toys versus the quantity of them that were sold. Or it could be an image of two toys on a tabletop and you have to find where they are and draw a curve or line separating the two. Look over your files and make sure you don't have any files like toys.txt, toys.mat, toys.dat, toys.png, etc. that the assignment wants you to use.