No Arabic abstract
Inter-domain Gaussian processes (GPs) allow for high flexibility and low computational cost when performing approximate inference in GP models. They are particularly suitable for modeling data exhibiting global structure but are limited to stationary covariance functions and thus fail to model non-stationary data effectively. We propose Inter-domain Deep Gaussian Processes, an extension of inter-domain shallow GPs that combines the advantages of inter-domain and deep Gaussian processes (DGPs), and demonstrate how to leverage existing approximate inference methods to perform simple and scalable approximate inference using inter-domain features in DGPs. We assess the performance of our method on a range of regression tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms inter-domain shallow GPs and conventional DGPs on challenging large-scale real-world datasets exhibiting both global structure as well as a high-degree of non-stationarity.
Deep neural networks (DNN) and Gaussian processes (GP) are two powerful models with several theoretical connections relating them, but the relationship between their training methods is not well understood. In this paper, we show that certain Gaussian posterior approximations for Bayesian DNNs are equivalent to GP posteriors. This enables us to relate solutions and iterations of a deep-learning algorithm to GP inference. As a result, we can obtain a GP kernel and a nonlinear feature map while training a DNN. Surprisingly, the resulting kernel is the neural tangent kernel. We show kernels obtained on real datasets and demonstrate the use of the GP marginal likelihood to tune hyperparameters of DNNs. Our work aims to facilitate further research on combining DNNs and GPs in practical settings.
We investigate the Student-t process as an alternative to the Gaussian process as a nonparametric prior over functions. We derive closed form expressions for the marginal likelihood and predictive distribution of a Student-t process, by integrating away an inverse Wishart process prior over the covariance kernel of a Gaussian process model. We show surprising equivalences between different hierarchical Gaussian process models leading to Student-t processes, and derive a new sampling scheme for the inverse Wishart process, which helps elucidate these equivalences. Overall, we show that a Student-t process can retain the attractive properties of a Gaussian process -- a nonparametric representation, analytic marginal and predictive distributions, and easy model selection through covariance kernels -- but has enhanced flexibility, and predictive covariances that, unlike a Gaussian process, explicitly depend on the values of training observations. We verify empirically that a Student-t process is especially useful in situations where there are changes in covariance structure, or in applications like Bayesian optimization, where accurate predictive covariances are critical for good performance. These advantages come at no additional computational cost over Gaussian processes.
We show that the gradient estimates used in training Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) with importance-weighted variational inference are susceptible to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) issues. Specifically, we show both theoretically and via an extensive empirical evaluation that the SNR of the gradient estimates for the latent variables variational parameters decreases as the number of importance samples increases. As a result, these gradient estimates degrade to pure noise if the number of importance samples is too large. To address this pathology, we show how doubly reparameterized gradient estimators, originally proposed for training variational autoencoders, can be adapted to the DGP setting and that the resultant estimators completely remedy the SNR issue, thereby providing more reliable training. Finally, we demonstrate that our fix can lead to consistent improvements in the predictive performance of DGP models.
Kernel methods on discrete domains have shown great promise for many challenging data types, for instance, biological sequence data and molecular structure data. Scalable kernel methods like Support Vector Machines may offer good predictive performances but do not intrinsically provide uncertainty estimates. In contrast, probabilistic kernel methods like Gaussian Processes offer uncertainty estimates in addition to good predictive performance but fall short in terms of scalability. While the scalability of Gaussian processes can be improved using sparse inducing point approximations, the selection of these inducing points remains challenging. We explore different techniques for selecting inducing points on discrete domains, including greedy selection, determinantal point processes, and simulated annealing. We find that simulated annealing, which can select inducing points that are not in the training set, can perform competitively with support vector machines and full Gaussian processes on synthetic data, as well as on challenging real-world DNA sequence data.
Propagating input uncertainty through non-linear Gaussian process (GP) mappings is intractable. This hinders the task of training GPs using uncertain and partially observed inputs. In this paper we refer to this task as semi-described learning. We then introduce a GP framework that solves both, the semi-described and the semi-supervised learning problems (where missing values occur in the outputs). Auto-regressive state space simulation is also recognised as a special case of semi-described learning. To achieve our goal we develop variational methods for handling semi-described inputs in GPs, and couple them with algorithms that allow for imputing the missing values while treating the uncertainty in a principled, Bayesian manner. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world data study the problems of iterative forecasting and regression/classification with missing values. The results suggest that the principled propagation of uncertainty stemming from our framework can significantly improve performance in these tasks.