Posterior Variance Analysis of Gaussian Processes with Application to Average Learning Curves

The posterior variance of Gaussian processes is a valuable measure of the learning error which is exploited in various applications such as safe reinforcement learning and control design. However, suitable analysis of the posterior variance which captures its behavior for finite and infinite number of training data is missing. This paper derives a novel bound for the posterior variance function which requires only local information because it depends only on the number of training samples in the proximity of a considered test point. Furthermore, we prove sufficient conditions which ensure the convergence of the posterior variance to zero. Finally, we demonstrate that the extension of our bound to an average learning bound outperforms existing approaches

Learning curves for multi-task Gaussian process regression

We study the average case performance of multi-task Gaussian process (GP) regression as captured in the learning curve, i.e. the average Bayes error for a chosen task versus the total number of examples n for all tasks. For GP covariances that are the product of an input-dependent covariance function and a free-form intertask covariance matrix, we show that accurate approximations for the learning curve can be obtained for an arbitrary number of tasks T. We use these to study the asymptotic learning behaviour for large n. Surprisingly, multi-task learning can be asymptotically essentially useless, in the sense that examples from other tasks help only when the degree of inter-task correlation, ρ, is near its maximal value ρ = 1. This effect is most extreme for learning of smooth target functions as described by e.g. squared exponential kernels. We also demonstrate that when learning many tasks, the learning curves separate into an initial phase, where the Bayes error on each task is reduced down to a plateau value by “collective learning” even though most tasks have not seen examples, and a final decay that occurs once the number of examples is proportional to the number of tasks. 1 Introduction an