“…Examples include structured data such as bioinformatics sequences, graphs, or tree structures as they occur in linguistics, time series data, functional data arising in mass spectrometry, relational data stored in relational databases, etc. In consequence, a variety of techniques has been developed to extend powerful statistical machine learning tools towards non-vectorial data such as kernel methods using structure kernels, recursive and graph networks, functional methods, relational approaches, and similar [9,12,5,27,6,26,10,11]. One very prominent way to extend statistical machine learning tools is offered by the choice of problemspecific measures of data proximity, which can often directly be used in machine learning tools based on similarities, dissimilarities, distances, or kernels.…”