59,135 research outputs found
Large-scale Heteroscedastic Regression via Gaussian Process
Heteroscedastic regression considering the varying noises among observations
has many applications in the fields like machine learning and statistics. Here
we focus on the heteroscedastic Gaussian process (HGP) regression which
integrates the latent function and the noise function together in a unified
non-parametric Bayesian framework. Though showing remarkable performance, HGP
suffers from the cubic time complexity, which strictly limits its application
to big data. To improve the scalability, we first develop a variational sparse
inference algorithm, named VSHGP, to handle large-scale datasets. Furthermore,
two variants are developed to improve the scalability and capability of VSHGP.
The first is stochastic VSHGP (SVSHGP) which derives a factorized evidence
lower bound, thus enhancing efficient stochastic variational inference. The
second is distributed VSHGP (DVSHGP) which (i) follows the Bayesian committee
machine formalism to distribute computations over multiple local VSHGP experts
with many inducing points; and (ii) adopts hybrid parameters for experts to
guard against over-fitting and capture local variety. The superiority of DVSHGP
and SVSHGP as compared to existing scalable heteroscedastic/homoscedastic GPs
is then extensively verified on various datasets.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figure
Understanding and Comparing Scalable Gaussian Process Regression for Big Data
As a non-parametric Bayesian model which produces informative predictive
distribution, Gaussian process (GP) has been widely used in various fields,
like regression, classification and optimization. The cubic complexity of
standard GP however leads to poor scalability, which poses challenges in the
era of big data. Hence, various scalable GPs have been developed in the
literature in order to improve the scalability while retaining desirable
prediction accuracy. This paper devotes to investigating the methodological
characteristics and performance of representative global and local scalable GPs
including sparse approximations and local aggregations from four main
perspectives: scalability, capability, controllability and robustness. The
numerical experiments on two toy examples and five real-world datasets with up
to 250K points offer the following findings. In terms of scalability, most of
the scalable GPs own a time complexity that is linear to the training size. In
terms of capability, the sparse approximations capture the long-term spatial
correlations, the local aggregations capture the local patterns but suffer from
over-fitting in some scenarios. In terms of controllability, we could improve
the performance of sparse approximations by simply increasing the inducing
size. But this is not the case for local aggregations. In terms of robustness,
local aggregations are robust to various initializations of hyperparameters due
to the local attention mechanism. Finally, we highlight that the proper hybrid
of global and local scalable GPs may be a promising way to improve both the
model capability and scalability for big data.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figures, preprint submitted to KB
String and Membrane Gaussian Processes
In this paper we introduce a novel framework for making exact nonparametric
Bayesian inference on latent functions, that is particularly suitable for Big
Data tasks. Firstly, we introduce a class of stochastic processes we refer to
as string Gaussian processes (string GPs), which are not to be mistaken for
Gaussian processes operating on text. We construct string GPs so that their
finite-dimensional marginals exhibit suitable local conditional independence
structures, which allow for scalable, distributed, and flexible nonparametric
Bayesian inference, without resorting to approximations, and while ensuring
some mild global regularity constraints. Furthermore, string GP priors
naturally cope with heterogeneous input data, and the gradient of the learned
latent function is readily available for explanatory analysis. Secondly, we
provide some theoretical results relating our approach to the standard GP
paradigm. In particular, we prove that some string GPs are Gaussian processes,
which provides a complementary global perspective on our framework. Finally, we
derive a scalable and distributed MCMC scheme for supervised learning tasks
under string GP priors. The proposed MCMC scheme has computational time
complexity and memory requirement , where
is the data size and the dimension of the input space. We illustrate the
efficacy of the proposed approach on several synthetic and real-world datasets,
including a dataset with millions input points and attributes.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), Volume
1
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