Compute the kernel between arrays X and optional array Y.
This method takes either a vector array or a kernel matrix, and returns a kernel matrix. If the input is a vector array, the kernels are computed. If the input is a kernel matrix, it is returned instead.
This method provides a safe way to take a kernel matrix as input, while preserving compatibility with many other algorithms that take a vector array.
If Y is given (default is None), then the returned matrix is the pairwise kernel between the arrays from both X and Y.
[‘additive_chi2’, ‘chi2’, ‘linear’, ‘poly’, ‘polynomial’, ‘rbf’, ‘laplacian’, ‘sigmoid’, ‘cosine’]
Read more in the User Guide.
Array of pairwise kernels between samples, or a feature array. The shape of the array should be (n_samples_X, n_samples_X) if metric == “precomputed” and (n_samples_X, n_features) otherwise.
A second feature array only if X has shape (n_samples_X, n_features).
The metric to use when calculating kernel between instances in a feature array. If metric is a string, it must be one of the metrics in pairwise.PAIRWISE_KERNEL_FUNCTIONS. If metric is “precomputed”, X is assumed to be a kernel matrix. Alternatively, if metric is a callable function, it is called on each pair of instances (rows) and the resulting value recorded. The callable should take two rows from X as input and return the corresponding kernel value as a single number. This means that callables from sklearn.metrics.pairwise are not allowed, as they operate on matrices, not single samples. Use the string identifying the kernel instead.
Whether to filter invalid parameters or not.
The number of jobs to use for the computation. This works by breaking down the pairwise matrix into n_jobs even slices and computing them using multithreading.
None means 1 unless in a joblib.parallel_backend context. -1 means using all processors. See Glossary for more details.
Any further parameters are passed directly to the kernel function.
A kernel matrix K such that K_{i, j} is the kernel between the ith and jth vectors of the given matrix X, if Y is None. If Y is not None, then K_{i, j} is the kernel between the ith array from X and the jth array from Y.
If metric is ‘precomputed’, Y is ignored and X is returned.
>>> from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import pairwise_kernels
>>> X = [[0, 0, 0], [1, 1, 1]]
>>> Y = [[1, 0, 0], [1, 1, 0]]
>>> pairwise_kernels(X, Y, metric='linear')
array([[0., 0.],
[1., 2.]])
© 2007–2025 The scikit-learn developers
Licensed under the 3-clause BSD License.
https://scikit-learn.org/1.6/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.pairwise.pairwise_kernels.html