  We introduce propagation kernels, a general graph-kernel framework for
efficiently measuring the similarity of structured data. Propagation kernels
are based on monitoring how information spreads through a set of given graphs.
They leverage early-stage distributions from propagation schemes such as random
walks to capture structural information encoded in node labels, attributes, and
edge information. This has two benefits. First, off-the-shelf propagation
schemes can be used to naturally construct kernels for many graph types,
including labeled, partially labeled, unlabeled, directed, and attributed
graphs. Second, by leveraging existing efficient and informative propagation
schemes, propagation kernels can be considerably faster than state-of-the-art
approaches without sacrificing predictive performance. We will also show that
if the graphs at hand have a regular structure, for instance when modeling
image or video data, one can exploit this regularity to scale the kernel
computation to large databases of graphs with thousands of nodes. We support
our contributions by exhaustive experiments on a number of real-world graphs
from a variety of application domains.
