793 research outputs found
Mind the nuisance: Gaussian process classification using privileged noise
The learning with privileged information setting has recently attracted a lot of attention within the machine learning community, as it allows the integration of additional knowledge into the training process of a classifier, even when this comes in the form of a data modality that is not available at test time. Here, we show that privileged information can naturally be treated as noise in the latent function of a Gaussian process classifier (GPC). That is, in contrast to the standard GPC setting, the latent function is not just a nuisance but a feature: it becomes a natural measure of confidence about the training data by modulating the slope of the GPC probit likelihood function. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that the proposed GPC method using privileged noise, called GPC+, improves over a standard GPC without privileged knowledge, and also over the current state-of-the-art SVM-based method, SVM+. Moreover, we show that advanced neural networks and deep learning methods can be compressed as privileged information
Approximate Inference for Nonstationary Heteroscedastic Gaussian process Regression
This paper presents a novel approach for approximate integration over the
uncertainty of noise and signal variances in Gaussian process (GP) regression.
Our efficient and straightforward approach can also be applied to integration
over input dependent noise variance (heteroscedasticity) and input dependent
signal variance (nonstationarity) by setting independent GP priors for the
noise and signal variances. We use expectation propagation (EP) for inference
and compare results to Markov chain Monte Carlo in two simulated data sets and
three empirical examples. The results show that EP produces comparable results
with less computational burden
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
Spatial adaptation in heteroscedastic regression: Propagation approach
The paper concerns the problem of pointwise adaptive estimation in regression
when the noise is heteroscedastic and incorrectly known. The use of the local
approximation method, which includes the local polynomial smoothing as a
particular case, leads to a finite family of estimators corresponding to
different degrees of smoothing. Data-driven choice of localization degree in
this case can be understood as the problem of selection from this family. This
task can be performed by a suggested in Katkovnik and Spokoiny (2008) FLL
technique based on Lepski's method. An important issue with this type of
procedures - the choice of certain tuning parameters - was addressed in
Spokoiny and Vial (2009). The authors called their approach to the parameter
calibration "propagation". In the present paper the propagation approach is
developed and justified for the heteroscedastic case in presence of the noise
misspecification. Our analysis shows that the adaptive procedure allows a
misspecification of the covariance matrix with a relative error of order
1/log(n), where n is the sample size.Comment: 47 pages. This is the final version of the paper published in at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-EJS180 the Electronic Journal of Statistics
(http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
(http://www.imstat.org
Laplace Approximation for Divisive Gaussian Processes for Nonstationary Regression
The standard Gaussian Process regression (GP) is usually formulated under stationary hypotheses: The noise power is considered constant throughout the input space and the covariance of the prior distribution is typically modeled as depending only on the difference between input samples. These assumptions can be too restrictive and unrealistic for many real-world problems. Although nonstationarity can be achieved using specific covariance functions, they require a prior knowledge of the kind of nonstationarity, not available for most applications. In this paper we propose to use the Laplace approximation to make inference in a divisive GP model to perform nonstationary regression, including heteroscedastic noise cases. The log-concavity of the likelihood ensures a unimodal posterior and makes that the Laplace approximation converges to a unique maximum. The characteristics of the likelihood also allow to obtain accurate posterior approximations when compared to the Expectation Propagation (EP) approximations and the asymptotically exact posterior provided by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo implementation with Elliptical Slice Sampling (ESS), but at a reduced computational load with respect to both, EP and ESS
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