Learning with Distance Substitution Kernels

During recent years much effort has been spent in incorporating problem specific a-priori knowledge into kernel methods for machine learning. A common example is a-priori knowledge given by a distance measure between objects. A simple but effective approach for kernel construction consists of substituting the Euclidean distance in ordinary kernel functions by the problem specific distance measure. We formalize this distance substitution procedure and investigate theoretical and empirical effects. In particular we state criteria for definiteness of the resulting kernels. We demonstrate the wide applicability by solving several classification tasks with SVMs. Regularization of the kernel matrices can additionally increase the recognition accuracy.