31,758 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
Forecasting of commercial sales with large scale Gaussian Processes
This paper argues that there has not been enough discussion in the field of
applications of Gaussian Process for the fast moving consumer goods industry.
Yet, this technique can be important as it e.g., can provide automatic feature
relevance determination and the posterior mean can unlock insights on the data.
Significant challenges are the large size and high dimensionality of commercial
data at a point of sale. The study reviews approaches in the Gaussian Processes
modeling for large data sets, evaluates their performance on commercial sales
and shows value of this type of models as a decision-making tool for
management.Comment: 1o pages, 5 figure
Asymptotic equivalence for inhomogeneous jump diffusion processes and white noise
We prove the global asymptotic equivalence between the experiments generated
by the discrete (high frequency) or continuous observation of a path of a time
inhomogeneous jump-diffusion process and a Gaussian white noise experiment.
Here, the considered parameter is the drift function, and we suppose that the
observation time tends to . The approximation is given in the sense
of the Le Cam -distance, under smoothness conditions on the unknown
drift function. These asymptotic equivalences are established by constructing
explicit Markov kernels that can be used to reproduce one experiment from the
other.Comment: 20 pages; to appear on ESAIM: P\&S. In this version there are some
improvements in the exposition following the reports suggestion
The wild bootstrap for multilevel models
In this paper we study the performance of the most popular bootstrap schemes
for multilevel data. Also, we propose a modified version of the wild bootstrap
procedure for hierarchical data structures. The wild bootstrap does not require
homoscedasticity or assumptions on the distribution of the error processes.
Hence, it is a valuable tool for robust inference in a multilevel framework. We
assess the finite size performances of the schemes through a Monte Carlo study.
The results show that for big sample sizes it always pays off to adopt an
agnostic approach as the wild bootstrap outperforms other techniques
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
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