  Transfer operators such as the Perron--Frobenius or Koopman operator play an
important role in the global analysis of complex dynamical systems. The
eigenfunctions of these operators can be used to detect metastable sets, to
project the dynamics onto the dominant slow processes, or to separate
superimposed signals. We extend transfer operator theory to reproducing kernel
Hilbert spaces and show that these operators are related to Hilbert space
representations of conditional distributions, known as conditional mean
embeddings in the machine learning community. Moreover, numerical methods to
compute empirical estimates of these embeddings are akin to data-driven methods
for the approximation of transfer operators such as extended dynamic mode
decomposition and its variants. One main benefit of the presented kernel-based
approaches is that these methods can be applied to any domain where a
similarity measure given by a kernel is available. We illustrate the results
with the aid of guiding examples and highlight potential applications in
molecular dynamics as well as video and text data analysis.
