kernlab is an extensible package for kernel-based machine learning methods in R. It takes advantage of R's new S4 ob ject model and provides a framework for creating and using kernel-based algorithms. The package contains dot product primitives (kernels), implementations of support vector machines and the relevance vector machine, Gaussian processes, a ranking algorithm, kernel PCA, kernel CCA, and a spectral clustering algorithm. Moreover it provides a general purpose quadratic programming solver, and an incomplete Cholesky decomposition method.