I would like to perform recursive feature elimination with nested grid search and cross-validation for each feature subset using scikit-learn. From the RFECV
Unfortunately, RFECV is limited to cross-validating the number of components. You can not search over the parameters of the SVM with it. The error is because SVC is expecting a float as C, and you gave it a list.
You can do one of two things: Run GridSearchCV on RFECV, which will result in splitting the data into folds two times (ones inside GridSearchCV and once inside RFECV), but the search over the number of components will be efficient, OR you could do GridSearchCV just on RFE, which would result in a single splitting of the data, but in very inefficient scanning of the parameters of the RFE estimator.
If you would like to make the docstring less ambiguous, a pull request would be welcome :)