Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a recent and growing branch of statistics
devoted to the study of the shape of the data. In this work we investigate the
predictive power of TDA in the context of supervised learning. Since
topological summaries, most noticeably the Persistence Diagram, are typically
defined in complex spaces, we adopt a kernel approach to translate them into
more familiar vector spaces. We define a topological exponential kernel, we
characterize it, and we show that, despite not being positive semi-definite, it
can be successfully used in regression and classification tasks
