10,883 research outputs found
Stagewise Safe Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Processes
Enforcing safety is a key aspect of many problems pertaining to sequential decision making under uncertainty, which require the decisions made at every step to be both informative of the optimal decision and also safe. For example, we value both efficacy and comfort in medical therapy, and efficiency and safety in robotic control. We consider this problem of optimizing an unknown utility function with absolute feedback or preference feedback subject to unknown safety constraints. We develop an efficient safe Bayesian optimization algorithm, StageOpt, that separates safe region expansion and utility function maximization into two distinct stages. Compared to existing approaches which interleave between expansion and optimization, we show that StageOpt is more efficient and naturally applicable to a broader class of problems. We provide theoretical guarantees for both the satisfaction of safety constraints as well as convergence to the optimal utility value. We evaluate StageOpt on both a variety of synthetic experiments, as well as in clinical practice. We demonstrate that StageOpt is more effective than existing safe optimization approaches, and is able to safely and effectively optimize spinal cord stimulation therapy in our clinical experiments
Replication or exploration? Sequential design for stochastic simulation experiments
We investigate the merits of replication, and provide methods for optimal
design (including replicates), with the goal of obtaining globally accurate
emulation of noisy computer simulation experiments. We first show that
replication can be beneficial from both design and computational perspectives,
in the context of Gaussian process surrogate modeling. We then develop a
lookahead based sequential design scheme that can determine if a new run should
be at an existing input location (i.e., replicate) or at a new one (explore).
When paired with a newly developed heteroskedastic Gaussian process model, our
dynamic design scheme facilitates learning of signal and noise relationships
which can vary throughout the input space. We show that it does so efficiently,
on both computational and statistical grounds. In addition to illustrative
synthetic examples, we demonstrate performance on two challenging real-data
simulation experiments, from inventory management and epidemiology.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure
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