Reliability is a critical indicator of organizations performance in face of market competition, since it contributes to production regularity. Its prediction is of great interest as it may anticipate trends of system failures and thus enable maintenance actions. The consideration of all aspects that influence system reliability may render its modeling very complex and learning methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) emerge as alternative prediction tools: previous knowledge about the function or process that maps input variables into output is not required. However, SVM performance is...