24,945 research outputs found
A Tutorial on Bayesian Optimization of Expensive Cost Functions, with Application to Active User Modeling and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
We present a tutorial on Bayesian optimization, a method of finding the
maximum of expensive cost functions. Bayesian optimization employs the Bayesian
technique of setting a prior over the objective function and combining it with
evidence to get a posterior function. This permits a utility-based selection of
the next observation to make on the objective function, which must take into
account both exploration (sampling from areas of high uncertainty) and
exploitation (sampling areas likely to offer improvement over the current best
observation). We also present two detailed extensions of Bayesian optimization,
with experiments---active user modelling with preferences, and hierarchical
reinforcement learning---and a discussion of the pros and cons of Bayesian
optimization based on our experiences
mfEGRA: Multifidelity Efficient Global Reliability Analysis through Active Learning for Failure Boundary Location
This paper develops mfEGRA, a multifidelity active learning method using
data-driven adaptively refined surrogates for failure boundary location in
reliability analysis. This work addresses the issue of prohibitive cost of
reliability analysis using Monte Carlo sampling for expensive-to-evaluate
high-fidelity models by using cheaper-to-evaluate approximations of the
high-fidelity model. The method builds on the Efficient Global Reliability
Analysis (EGRA) method, which is a surrogate-based method that uses adaptive
sampling for refining Gaussian process surrogates for failure boundary location
using a single-fidelity model. Our method introduces a two-stage adaptive
sampling criterion that uses a multifidelity Gaussian process surrogate to
leverage multiple information sources with different fidelities. The method
combines expected feasibility criterion from EGRA with one-step lookahead
information gain to refine the surrogate around the failure boundary. The
computational savings from mfEGRA depends on the discrepancy between the
different models, and the relative cost of evaluating the different models as
compared to the high-fidelity model. We show that accurate estimation of
reliability using mfEGRA leads to computational savings of 46% for an
analytic multimodal test problem and 24% for a three-dimensional acoustic horn
problem, when compared to single-fidelity EGRA. We also show the effect of
using a priori drawn Monte Carlo samples in the implementation for the acoustic
horn problem, where mfEGRA leads to computational savings of 45% for the
three-dimensional case and 48% for a rarer event four-dimensional case as
compared to single-fidelity EGRA
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