We propose a Standing Wave Decomposition (SWD) approximation to Gaussian Process regression (GP). GP involves a costly matrix inversion operation, which limits applicability to large data analysis. For an input space that can be approximated by a grid and when correlations among data are short-ranged, the kernel matrix inversion can be replaced by analytic diagonalization using the SWD. We show that this approach applies to uni- and multi-dimensional input data, extends to include longer-range correlations, and the grid can be in a latent space and used as inducing points. Through simulations, we show that our approximate method outperforms existing methods in predictive accuracy per unit time in the regime where data are plentiful. Our SWD-GP is recommended for regression analyses where there is a relatively large amount of data and or there are constraints on computation time.
Variational approaches are another popular method for GP inference. Variational methods turn the inference of the predictive mean and variance into an optimization problem @cite_5 . Variational GP often provides more accurate prediction than FITC @cite_9 and has been made progressively faster through a series of development---from stochastic variational inference @cite_7 , to distributed variational inference @cite_29 , to asynchronous distributed variational inference @cite_12 ---to handle billions of input data. Similar to our work and @cite_24 , @cite_16 uses grid inducing points with stochastic variational inference, which allows added efficiencies in computation via the Kronecker and Khatri-Rao products.
@cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_29 @cite_24 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_12
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Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful non-parametric function estimators. However, their applications are largely limited by the expensive computational cost of the inference procedures. Existing stochastic or distributed synchronous variational inferences, although have alleviated this issue by scaling up GPs to millions of samples, are still far from satisfactory for real-world large applications, where the data sizes are often orders of magnitudes larger, say, billions. To solve this problem, we propose ADVGP, the first Asynchronous Distributed Variational Gaussian Process inference for regression, on the recent large-scale machine learning platform, PARAMETERSERVER. ADVGP uses a novel, flexible variational framework based on a weight space augmentation, and implements the highly efficient, asynchronous proximal gradient optimization. While maintaining comparable or better predictive performance, ADVGP greatly improves upon the efficiency of the existing variational methods. With ADVGP, we effortlessly scale up GP regression to a real-world application with billions of samples and demonstrate an excellent, superior prediction accuracy to the popular linear models. Abstract Documents in computer-readable form can be used to provide information about other documents, i.e. those they cite. To do this efficiently requires procedures for computer recognition of citing statements. This is not easy, especially for multi-sentence citing statements. Computer recognition procedures have been developed which are accurate to the following extent: 73 of the words in statements selected by computer procedures as being citing statements are words which are correctly attributable to the corresponding documents. The retrieval effectiveness of computer-recognized citing statements was tested in the following way. First, for eight retrieval requests in inorganiic chemistry, average recall by search of Chemical Abstracts Service indexing and Chemical Abstracts abstract text words was found to be 50 . Words from citing statements referring to the papers to be retrieved were then added to the index terms and abstract words as additional access points, and searching was repeated. Average recall increased to 70 . Only words from citing statements published within a year of the cited papers were used. The retrieval effect of citing statement words alone (published within a year) without index or abstract terms was the following: average recall was 40 . When just the words of the titles of the cited papers were added to those citing statement words, average recall increased to 50 . Variational inference has become a widely used method to approximate posteriors in complex latent variables models. However, deriving a variational inference algorithm generally requires signicant model-specic analysis. These eorts can hinder and deter us from quickly developing and exploring a variety of models for a problem at hand. In this paper, we present a box" variational inference algorithm, one that can be quickly applied to many models with little additional derivation. Our method is based on a stochastic optimization of the variational objective where the noisy gradient is computed from Monte Carlo samples from the variational distribution. We develop a number of methods to reduce the variance of the gradient, always maintaining the criterion that we want to avoid dicult model-based derivations. We evaluate our method against the corresponding black box sampling based methods. We nd that our method reaches better predictive likelihoods much faster than sampling methods. Finally, we demonstrate that Black Box Variational Inference lets us easily explore a wide space of models by quickly constructing and evaluating several models of longitudinal healthcare data. We introduce local expectation gradients which is a general purpose stochastic variational inference algorithm for constructing stochastic gradients by sampling from the variational distribution. This algorithm divides the problem of estimating the stochastic gradients over multiple variational parameters into smaller sub-tasks so that each sub-task explores intelligently the most relevant part of the variational distribution. This is achieved by performing an exact expectation over the single random variable that most correlates with the variational parameter of interest resulting in a Rao-Blackwellized estimate that has low variance. Our method works efficiently for both continuous and discrete random variables. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm has interesting similarities with Gibbs sampling but at the same time, unlike Gibbs sampling, can be trivially parallelized. The GPML toolbox provides a wide range of functionality for Gaussian process (GP) inference and prediction. GPs are specified by mean and covariance functions; we offer a library of simple mean and covariance functions and mechanisms to compose more complex ones. Several likelihood functions are supported including Gaussian and heavy-tailed for regression as well as others suitable for classification. Finally, a range of inference methods is provided, including exact and variational inference, Expectation Propagation, and Laplace's method dealing with non-Gaussian likelihoods and FITC for dealing with large regression tasks. We introduce stochastic variational inference for Gaussian process models. This enables the application of Gaussian process (GP) models to data sets containing millions of data points. We show how GPs can be vari- ationally decomposed to depend on a set of globally relevant inducing variables which factorize the model in the necessary manner to perform variational inference. Our ap- proach is readily extended to models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and latent variable models based around Gaussian processes. We demonstrate the approach on a simple toy problem and two real world data sets. We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Using stochastic variational inference, we analyze several large collections of documents: 300K articles from Nature, 1.8M articles from The New York Times, and 3.8M articles from Wikipedia. Stochastic inference can easily handle data sets of this size and outperforms traditional variational inference, which can only handle a smaller subset. (We also show that the Bayesian nonparametric topic model outperforms its parametric counterpart.) Stochastic variational inference lets us apply complex Bayesian models to massive data sets.