  Many machine learning problems can be formulated as predicting labels for a
pair of objects. Problems of that kind are often referred to as pairwise
learning, dyadic prediction or network inference problems. During the last
decade kernel methods have played a dominant role in pairwise learning. They
still obtain a state-of-the-art predictive performance, but a theoretical
analysis of their behavior has been underexplored in the machine learning
literature.
  In this work we review and unify existing kernel-based algorithms that are
commonly used in different pairwise learning settings, ranging from matrix
filtering to zero-shot learning. To this end, we focus on closed-form efficient
instantiations of Kronecker kernel ridge regression. We show that independent
task kernel ridge regression, two-step kernel ridge regression and a linear
matrix filter arise naturally as a special case of Kronecker kernel ridge
regression, implying that all these methods implicitly minimize a squared loss.
In addition, we analyze universality, consistency and spectral filtering
properties. Our theoretical results provide valuable insights in assessing the
advantages and limitations of existing pairwise learning methods.
