Timezone: »

 
Poster
Kernel Mean Estimation via Spectral Filtering
Krikamol Muandet · Bharath Sriperumbudur · Bernhard Schölkopf

Mon Dec 08 04:00 PM -- 08:59 PM (PST) @ Level 2, room 210D
in Poster Session and Reception »

The problem of estimating the kernel mean in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) is central to kernel methods in that it is used by classical approaches (e.g., when centering a kernel PCA matrix), and it also forms the core inference step of modern kernel methods (e.g., kernel-based non-parametric tests) that rely on embedding probability distributions in RKHSs. Previous work [1] has shown that shrinkage can help in constructing “better” estimators of the kernel mean than the empirical estimator. The present paper studies the consistency and admissibility of the estimators in [1], and proposes a wider class of shrinkage estimators that improve upon the empirical estimator by considering appropriate basis functions. Using the kernel PCA basis, we show that some of these estimators can be constructed using spectral filtering algorithms which are shown to be consistent under some technical assumptions. Our theoretical analysis also reveals a fundamental connection to the kernel-based supervised learning framework. The proposed estimators are simple to implement and perform well in practice.

[ PDF] 

Author Information

Krikamol Muandet (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)
Bharath Sriperumbudur (The Pennsylvania State University)
Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen)

Bernhard Scholkopf received degrees in mathematics (London) and physics (Tubingen), and a doctorate in computer science from the Technical University Berlin. He has researched at AT&T Bell Labs, at GMD FIRST, Berlin, at the Australian National University, Canberra, and at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). In 2001, he was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics; in 2010 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. For further information, see www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/~bs.

More from the Same Authors