Diffusion Kernels on Graphs and Other Discrete Structures

The application of kernel-based learning algorithms has, so far, largely been confined to realvalued data and a few special data types, such as strings. In this paper we propose a general method of constructing natural families of kernels over discrete structures, based on the matrix exponentiation idea. In particular, we focus on generating kernels on graphs, for which we propose a special class of exponential kernels, based on the heat equation, called diffusion kernels, and show that these can be regarded as the discretization of the familiar Gaussian kernel of Euclidean space.