The key idea of Bayesian optimization is replacing an expensive target function with a cheap surrogate model. By selection of an acquisition function for Bayesian optimization, we trade off between exploration and exploitation. The acquisition function typically depends on the mean and the variance of the surrogate model at a given point. The most common Gaussian process-based surrogate model assumes that the target with fixed parameters is a realization of a Gaussian process. However, often the target function doesn't satisfy this approximation. Here we consider target functions that come from the binomial distribution with the parameter that depends on inputs. Typically we can vary how many Bernoulli samples we obtain during each evaluation. We propose a general Gaussian process model that takes into account Bernoulli outputs. To make things work we consider a simple acquisition function based on Expected Improvement and a heuristic strategy to choose the number of samples at each point thus taking into account precision of the obtained output.
We provide a comprehensive overview of many recent algorithms for approximate inference in Gaussian process models for probabilistic binary classification. The relationships between several approaches are elucidated theoretically, and the properties of the different algorithms are corroborated by experimental results. We examine both 1) the quality of the predictive distributions and 2) the suitability of the different marginal likelihood approximations for model selection (selecting hyperparameters) and compare to a gold standard based on MCMC. Interestingly, some methods produce good predictive distributions although their marginal likelihood approximations are poor. Strong conclusions are drawn about the methods: The Expectation Propagation algorithm is almost always the method of choice unless the computational budget is very tight. We also extend existing methods in various ways, and provide unifying code implementing all approaches. The variational approximation of posterior distributions by multivariate gaussians has been much less popular in the machine learning community compared to the corresponding approximation by factorizing distributions. This is for a good reason: the gaussian approximation is in general plagued by an number of variational parameters to be optimized, being the number of random variables. In this letter, we discuss the relationship between the Laplace and the variational approximation, and we show that for models with gaussian priors and factorizing likelihoods, the number of variational parameters is actually . The approach is applied to gaussian process regression with nongaussian likelihoods.