  Proximities are at the heart of almost all machine learning methods. If the
input data are given as numerical vectors of equal lengths, euclidean distance,
or a Hilbertian inner product is frequently used in modeling algorithms. In a
more generic view, objects are compared by a (symmetric) similarity or
dissimilarity measure, which may not obey particular mathematical properties.
This renders many machine learning methods invalid, leading to convergence
problems and the loss of guarantees, like generalization bounds. In many cases,
the preferred dissimilarity measure is not metric, like the earth mover
distance, or the similarity measure may not be a simple inner product in a
Hilbert space but in its generalization a Krein space. If the input data are
non-vectorial, like text sequences, proximity-based learning is used or ngram
embedding techniques can be applied. Standard embeddings lead to the desired
fixed-length vector encoding, but are costly and have substantial limitations
in preserving the original data's full information. As an information
preserving alternative, we propose a complex-valued vector embedding of
proximity data. This allows suitable machine learning algorithms to use these
fixed-length, complex-valued vectors for further processing. The complex-valued
data can serve as an input to complex-valued machine learning algorithms. In
particular, we address supervised learning and use extensions of
prototype-based learning. The proposed approach is evaluated on a variety of
standard benchmarks and shows strong performance compared to traditional
techniques in processing non-metric or non-psd proximity data.
