Support vector machines and kernel methods are increasingly popular in
genomics and computational biology, due to their good performance in real-world
applications and strong modularity that makes them suitable to a wide range of
problems, from the classification of tumors to the automatic annotation of
proteins. Their ability to work in high dimension, to process non-vectorial
data, and the natural framework they provide to integrate heterogeneous data
are particularly relevant to various problems arising in computational biology.
In this chapter we survey some of the most prominent applications published so
far, highlighting the particular developments in kernel methods triggered by
problems in biology, and mention a few promising research directions likely to
expand in the future