Abstract

Editor: Kernel based methods are increasingly being used for data modeling because of their conceptual simplicity and outstanding performance on many tasks. However, the kernel function is often chosen using trial-and-error heuristics. In this paper we address the problem of measuring the degree of agreement between a kernel and a learning task. A quantitative measure of agreement is important from both a theoretical and practical point of view. We propose a quantity to capture this notion, which we call Alignment. We study its theoretical properties, and derive a series of simple algorithms for adapting a kernel to the labels and vice versa. This produces a series of novel methods for clustering and transduction, kernel combination and kernel selection. The algorithms are tested on two publicly available datasets and are shown to exhibit good performance.

Citations