text: A commonly used paradigm for representing graphs is to use a vector that contains normalized frequencies of occurrence of certain motifs or sub-graphs. This vector representation can be used in a variety of applications, such as, for computing similarity between graphs. The graphlet kernel of [32] uses induced sub-graphs of k nodes (christened as graphlets by Przulj [28]) as motifs in the vector representation, and computes the kernel via a dot product between these vectors. One can easily show that this is a valid kernel between graphs. However, such a vector representation suffers from a few drawbacks. As k becomes larger we encounter the sparsity problem; most higher order graphlets will not occur in a given graph. This leads to diagonal dominance, that is, a given graph is similar to itself but not to any other graph in the dataset. On the other hand, since lower order graphlets tend to be more numerous, using lower values of k does not provide enough discrimination ability. We propose a smoothing technique to tackle the above problems. Our method is based on a novel extension of Kneser-Ney and Pitman-Yor smoothing techniques from natural language processing to graphs. We use the relationships between lower order and higher order graphlets in order to derive our method. Consequently, our smoothing algorithm not only respects the dependency between sub-graphs but also tackles the diagonal dominance problem by distributing the probability mass across graphlets. In our experiments, the smoothed graphlet kernel outperforms graph kernels based on raw frequency counts.
  @cite_4: 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. An interesting and important challenge is thus to investigate kernels on instances that are represented by graphs. So far, only very specific graphs such as trees and strings have been considered.
  @cite_22: 
  @cite_7: With applications in biology, the world-wide web, and several other areas, mining of graph-structured objects has received significant interest recently. One of the major research directions in this field is concerned with predictive data mining in graph databases where each instance is represented by a graph. Some of the proposed approaches for this task rely on the excellent classification performance of support vector machines. To control the computational cost of these approaches, the underlying kernel functions are based on frequent patterns. In contrast to these approaches, we propose a kernel function based on a natural set of cyclic and tree patterns independent of their frequency, and discuss its computational aspects. To practically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we use the popular NCI-HIV molecule dataset. Our experimental results show that cyclic pattern kernels can be computed quickly and offer predictive performance superior to recent graph kernels based on frequent patterns.
  @cite_8: In this article, we propose fast subtree kernels on graphs. On graphs with n nodes and m edges and maximum degree d, these kernels comparing subtrees of height h can be computed in O(mh), whereas the classic subtree kernel by Ramon & Gartner scales as O(n24dh). Key to this efficiency is the observation that the Weisfeiler-Lehman test of isomorphism from graph theory elegantly computes a subtree kernel as a byproduct. Our fast subtree kernels can deal with labeled graphs, scale up easily to large graphs and outperform state-of-the-art graph kernels on several classification benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy and runtime.
  @cite_6: In this paper we present a new algorithm suitable for matching discrete objects such as strings and trees in linear time, thus obviating dynamic programming with quadratic time complexity. Furthermore, prediction cost in many cases can be reduced to linear cost in the length of the sequence to be classified, regardless of the number of support vectors. This improvement on the currently available algorithms makes string kernels a viable alternative for the practitioner.
  @cite_24: 
  @cite_5: 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.
summary: Graph kernels can be considered as special cases of convolutional kernels proposed by . In general, graph kernels can be categorized into three classes: graph kernels based on walks and paths @cite_4 , @cite_6 , @cite_24 , graph kernels based on limited-size sub-graphs @cite_7 , @cite_8 , @cite_22 and graph kernels based on subtree patterns @cite_5 . performs a relaxation on the vertices and exploit labeling information embedded in the graphs to derive their so-called Weisfeiler-Lehman kernels. However, their kernel is applicable only to labeled graphs. The sparsity problem of graphlet kernels has been addressed before. Hash kernels proposed by addresses the sparsity problem by applying a sparse projection into a lower dimensional space. The idea here is that many higher order graphlets will collide'' and therefore be mapped to the same lower dimensional representation, thus avoiding the diagonal dominance problem. Unfortunately, we find that in our experiments the hash kernel is very sensitive to the hash value used for embedding and rarely performed well as compared to the MLE estimate.