Transforming Gaussian Processes With Normalizing Flows
Juan Maroñas, Oliver Hamelijnck, Jeremias Knoblauch, Theodoros Damoulas
Abstract
Gaussian Processes (GP) can be used as flexible, non-parametric function priors. Inspired by the growing body of work on Normalizing Flows, we enlarge this class of priors through a parametric invertible transformation that can be made input-dependent. Doing so also allows us to encode interpretable prior knowledge (e.g., boundedness constraints). We derive a variational approximation to the resulting Bayesian inference problem, which is as fast as stochastic variational GP regression (Hensman et al., 2013; Dezfouli and Bonilla, 2015). This makes the model a computationally efficient alternative to other hierarchical extensions of GP priors (Lázaro-Gredilla,2012; Damianou and Lawrence,2013). The resulting algorithm’s computational and inferential performance is excellent, and we demonstrate this on a range of data sets. For example, even with only 5 inducing points and an input-dependent flow, our method is consistently competitive with a standard sparse GP fitted using 100 inducing points.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v130-maronas21a,
title = { Transforming Gaussian Processes With Normalizing Flows },
author = {Maro{\~n}as, Juan and Hamelijnck, Oliver and Knoblauch, Jeremias and Damoulas, Theodoros},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
pages = {1081--1089},
year = {2021},
editor = {Banerjee, Arindam and Fukumizu, Kenji},
volume = {130},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {13--15 Apr},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v130/maronas21a/maronas21a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v130/maronas21a.html},
abstract = { Gaussian Processes (GP) can be used as flexible, non-parametric function priors. Inspired by the growing body of work on Normalizing Flows, we enlarge this class of priors through a parametric invertible transformation that can be made input-dependent. Doing so also allows us to encode interpretable prior knowledge (e.g., boundedness constraints). We derive a variational approximation to the resulting Bayesian inference problem, which is as fast as stochastic variational GP regression (Hensman et al., 2013; Dezfouli and Bonilla, 2015). This makes the model a computationally efficient alternative to other hierarchical extensions of GP priors (Lázaro-Gredilla,2012; Damianou and Lawrence,2013). The resulting algorithm’s computational and inferential performance is excellent, and we demonstrate this on a range of data sets. For example, even with only 5 inducing points and an input-dependent flow, our method is consistently competitive with a standard sparse GP fitted using 100 inducing points. }
}