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Poster
Halting in Random Walk Kernels
Mahito Sugiyama · Karsten Borgwardt

Mon Dec 07 04:00 PM -- 08:59 PM (PST) @ 210 C #56
Random walk kernels measure graph similarity by counting matching walks in two graphs. In their most popular form of geometric random walk kernels, longer walks of length $k$ are downweighted by a factor of $\lambda^k$ ($\lambda < 1$) to ensure convergence of the corresponding geometric series. We know from the field of link prediction that this downweighting often leads to a phenomenon referred to as halting: Longer walks are downweighted so much that the similarity score is completely dominated by the comparison of walks of length 1. This is a naive kernel between edges and vertices. We theoretically show that halting may occur in geometric random walk kernels. We also empirically quantify its impact in simulated datasets and popular graph classification benchmark datasets. Our findings promise to be instrumental in future graph kernel development and applications of random walk kernels.

#### Author Information

##### Karsten Borgwardt (ETH Zurich)

Karsten Borgwardt is Professor of Data Mining at ETH Zürich, at the Department of Biosystems located in Basel. His work has won several awards, including the NIPS 2009 Outstanding Paper Award, the Krupp Award for Young Professors 2013 and a Starting Grant 2014 from the ERC-backup scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Since 2013, he is heading the Marie Curie Initial Training Network for "Machine Learning for Personalized Medicine" with 12 partner labs in 8 countries (http://www.mlpm.eu). The business magazine "Capital" listed him as one of the "Top 40 under 40" in Science in/from Germany in 2014, 2015 and 2016. For more information, visit: https://www.bsse.ethz.ch/mlcb