Weekly Machine Learning Research Paper Reading List -- #9

This paper investigates data dependent kernels that are derived directly from data. This has been an outstanding issue for about two decades which hampered the development of kernel-based methods. We introduce Isolation Kernel which is solely dependent on data distribution, requiring neither class information nor explicit learning to be a classifier. In contrast, existing data dependent kernels rely heavily on class information and explicit learning to produce a classifier. We show that Isolation Kernel approximates well to a data independent kernel function called Laplacian kernel under uniform density distribution. With this revelation, Isolation Kernel can be viewed as a data dependent kernel that adapts a data independent kernel to the structure of a dataset.