Missing data in kernel PCA

Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) is a widely used technique for visualisation and feature extraction. Despite its success and flexibility, the lack of a probabilistic interpretation means that some problems, such as handling missing or corrupted data, are very hard to deal with. In this paper we exploit the probabilistic interpretation of linear PCA together with recent results on latent variable models in Gaussian Processes in order to introduce an objective function for KPCA. This in turn allows a principled approach to the missing data problem. Furthermore, this new approach can be extended to reconstruct corrupted test data using fixed kernel feature extractors. The experimental results show strong improvements over widely used heuristics.