Expressivity versus efficiency of graph kernels
Jan Ramon, Thomas Gaertner · Lirias · 2003
Abstract. Recently, kernel methods have become a popular tool for machine learning and data mining. As most ‘real-world ’ data is structured, research in kernel methods has begun investigating kernels for various kinds of structured data. One of the most widely used tools for modeling structured data are graphs. In this paper we study the trade-off between expressivity and efficiency of graph kernels. First, we motivate the need for this discussion by showing that fully general graph kernels can not even be approximated efficiently. We also discuss generalizations of graph kernels defined in literature and show that they are either not positive definite or not very useful. Finally, we propose a new graph kernel based on subtree patterns. We argue that while a little more computationally expensive, this kernel is more expressive than kernels based on walks. 1