Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)A novel versatile digital signal processing (DSP)-based equalizer using support vector machine regression (SVR) is proposed for 16-quadrature amplitude modulated (16-QAM) coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) and experimentally compared to traditional DSP-based deterministic fiber-induced non-linearity equalizers (NLEs), namely the full-field digital back-propagation (DBP) and the inverse Volterra series transfer function-based NLE (V-NLE). For a 40 Gb/s 16-QAM CO-OFDM at 2000 km, SVR-NLE extends the optimum launched optical power (LOP) by 4 dB compared to V-NLE by means of reduction of fiber nonlinearity. In comparison to full-field DBP at a LOP of 6 dBm, SVR-NLE outperforms by similar to 1 dB in Q-factor. In addition, SVR-NLE is the most computational efficient DSP-NLE. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America41 25092512Centre of Excellence [CE110001018]Laureate Fellowship [FL120100029]Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/J017582/1, EP/L000091/1]FAPESP [2015/04113-0]Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)