1 A primer on kernel methods
Kernel methods in general, and support vector machines (SVMs) in particular, are increasingly used to solve various problems in computational biology. They offer versatile tools to process, analyze, and compare many types of data, and offer stateof-the-art performance in many cases. This self-contained introduction to positive definite kernels and kernel methods aims at providing the very basic knowledge and intuition that the reader might find useful in order to fully grasp the technical content of this book.