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Faster variational inducing input Gaussian process classification
Background: Gaussian processes (GP) provide an elegant and effective approach to learning in kernel machines. This approach leads to a highly interpretable model and allows using the Bayesian framework for model adaptation and incorporating the prior knowledge about the problem. The GP framework is successfully applied to regression, classification, and dimensionality reduction problems. Unfortunately, the standard methods for both GP-regression and GP-classification scale as O(n 3 ), where n is the size of the dataset, which makes them inapplicable to big data problems. A variety of methods have been proposed to overcome this limitation both for regression and classification problems. The most successful recent methods are based on the concept of inducing inputs. These methods reduce the computational complexity to O(nm2 ) where m is the number of inducing inputs with m typically much less than n. The present authors focus on classification. The current state-of-the-art method for this problem is based on stochastic optimization of an evidence lower bound (ELBO) that depends on O(m2 ) parameters. For complex problems, the required number of inducing points m is fairly big, making the optimization in this method challenging. Methods: The structure of variational lower bound that appears in inducing input GP classification has been analyzed. First, it has been noted that using quadratic approximation of several terms in this bound, it is possible to obtain analytical expressions for optimal values of most of the optimization parameters, thus sufficiently reducing the dimension of optimization space. Then, two methods have been provided for constructing necessary quadratic approximations: one is based on Jaakkola–Jordan bound for logistic function and the other is derived using Taylor expansion. Results: Two new variational lower bounds have been proposed for inducing input GP classification that depend on a number of parameters. Then, several methods have been suggested for optimization of these bounds and the resulting algorithms have been compared with the state-of-the-art approach based on stochastic optimization. Experiments on a bunch of classification datasets show that the new methods perform the same or better results than the existing one. However, new methods do not require any tunable parameters and can work in settings within a big range of n and m values, thus significantly simplifying training of GP classification models.