We introduce a family of kernels on graphs based on the notion of regularization operators. This generalizes in a natural way the notion of regularization and Greens functions, as commonly used for real valued functions, to graphs. It turns out that di#usion kernels can be found as a special case of our reasoning. We show that the class of positive, monotonically decreasing functions on the unit interval leads to kernels and corresponding regularization operators.

We believe that the cluster assumption is key to successful semi-supervised learning. Based on this, we propose three semi-supervised algorithms: 1. deriving graph-based distances that emphazise low density regions between clusters, followed by training a standard SVM; 2. optimizing the Transductive SVM objective function, which places the decision boundary in low density regions, by gradient descent; 3. combining the first two to make maximum use of the cluster assumption. We compare with state of the art algorithms and demonstrate superior accuracy for the latter two methods.

We interpret several well-known algorithms for dimensionality reduction of manifolds as kernel methods. Isomap, graph Laplacian eigenmap, and locally linear embedding (LLE) all utilize local neighborhood information to construct a global embedding of the manifold. We show how all three algorithms can be described as kernel PCA on specially constructed Gram matrices, and illustrate the similarities and differences between the algorithms with representative examples.

Abstract—This work presents a new perspective on characterizing the similarity between elements of a database or, more generally, nodes of a weighted and undirected graph. It is based on a Markov-chain model of random walk through the database. More precisely, we compute quantities (the average commute time, the pseudoinverse of the Laplacian matrix of the graph, etc.) that provide similarities between any pair of nodes, having the nice property of increasing when the number of paths connecting those elements increases and when the “length ” of paths decreases. It turns out that the square root of the average commute time is a Euclidean distance and that the pseudoinverse of the Laplacian matrix is a kernel matrix (its elements are inner products closely related to commute times). A principal component analysis (PCA) of the graph is introduced for computing the subspace projection of the node vectors in a manner that preserves as much variance as possible in terms of the Euclidean commute-time distance. This graph PCA provides a nice interpretation to the “Fiedler vector, ” widely used for graph partitioning. The model is evaluated on a collaborativerecommendation task where suggestions are made about which movies people should watch based upon what they watched in the past. Experimental results on the MovieLens database show that the Laplacian-based similarities perform well in comparison with other methods. The model, which nicely fits into the so-called “statistical relational learning ” framework, could also be used to compute document or word similarities, and, more generally, it could be applied to machine-learning and pattern-recognition tasks involving a relational database. Index Terms—Graph analysis, graph and database mining, collaborative recommendation, graph kernels, spectral clustering, Fiedler vector, proximity measures, statistical relational learning. 1

Abstract. We derive a family of kernels on dynamical systems by applying the Binet-Cauchy theorem to trajectories of states. Our derivation provides a unifying framework for all kernels on dynamical systems currently used in machine learning, including kernels derived from the behavioral framework, diffusion processes, marginalized kernels, kernels on graphs, and the kernels on sets arising from the subspace angle approach. In the case of linear time-invariant systems, we derive explicit formulae for computing the proposed Binet-Cauchy kernels by solving Sylvester equations, and relate the proposed kernels to existing kernels based on cepstrum coefficients and subspace angles. Besides their theoretical appeal, these kernels can be used efficiently in the comparison of video sequences of dynamic scenes that can be modeled as the output of a linear time-invariant dynamical system. One advantage of our kernels is that they take the initial conditions of the dynamical systems into account. As a first example, we use our kernels to compare video sequences of dynamic textures. As a second example, we apply our kernels to the problem of clustering short clips of a movie. Experimental evidence shows superior performance of our kernels. Keywords: Binet-Cauchy theorem, ARMA models and dynamical systems, Sylvester

This paper exploits the properties of the commute time between nodes of a graph for the purposes of clustering and embedding, and explores its applications to image segmentation and multi-body motion tracking. Our starting point is the lazy random walk on the graph, which is determined by the heatkernel of the graph and can be computed from the spectrum of the graph Laplacian. We characterize the random walk using the commute time (i.e. the expected time taken for a random walk to travel between two nodes and return) and show how this quantity may be computed from the Laplacian spectrum using the discrete Green’s function. Our motivation is that the commute time can be anticipated to be a more robust measure of the proximity of data than the raw proximity matrix. In this paper, we explore two applications of the commute time. The first is to develop a method for image segmentation using the eigenvector corresponding to the smallest eigenvalue of the commute time matrix. We show that our commute time segmentation method has the property of enhancing the intra-group coherence while weakening inter-group coherence and is superior to the normalized cut. The second application is to develop a robust multi-body motion tracking method using an embedding based on the commute time. Our embedding procedure preserves commute time, and is closely akin to kernel PCA, the Laplacian eigenmap and the diffusion map. We illustrate the results both on synthetic image sequences and real world video sequences, and compare our results with several alternative methods.

Feature selection aims to reduce dimensionality for building comprehensible learning models with good generalization performance. Feature selection algorithms are largely studied separately according to the type of learning: supervised or unsupervised. This work exploits intrinsic properties underlying supervised and unsupervised feature selection algorithms, and proposes a unified framework for feature selection based on spectral graph theory. The proposed framework is able to generate families of algorithms for both supervised and unsupervised feature selection. And we show that existing powerful algorithms such as ReliefF (supervised) and Laplacian Score (unsupervised) are special cases of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to unify supervised and unsupervised feature selection, and enable their joint study under a general framework. Experiments demonstrated the efficacy of the novel algorithms derived from the framework. 1.

We review recent methods for learning with positive definite kernels. All these methods formulate learning and estimation problems as linear tasks in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) associated with a kernel. We cover a wide range of methods, ranging from simple classifiers to sophisticated methods for estimation with structured data.

In this paper, we cast the image-ranking problem into the task of identifying “authority” nodes on an inferred visual similarity graph and propose an algorithm to analyze the visual link structure that can be created among a group of images. Through an iterative procedure based on the PageRank computation, a numerical weight is assigned to each image; this measures its relative importance to the other images being considered. The incorporation of visual signals in this process differs from the majority of largescale commercial-search engines in use today. Commercial search-engines often solely rely on the text clues of the pages in which images are embedded to rank images, and often entirely ignore the content of the images themselves as a ranking signal. To quantify the performance of our approach in a real-world system, we conducted a series of experiments based on the task of retrieving images for 2000 of the most popular products queries. Our experimental results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results.

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