Efficient Sensor Placement from Regression with Sparse Gaussian Processes in Continuous and Discrete Spaces

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jakkala, Kalvik, Akella, Srinivas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Jakkala, Kalvik
Akella, Srinivas
author_facet Jakkala, Kalvik
Akella, Srinivas
contents The sensor placement problem is a common problem that arises when monitoring correlated phenomena, such as temperature, precipitation, and salinity. Existing approaches to this problem typically formulate it as the maximization of information metrics, such as mutual information~(MI), and use optimization methods such as greedy algorithms in discrete domains, and derivative-free optimization methods such as genetic algorithms in continuous domains. However, computing MI for sensor placement requires discretizing the environment, and its computation cost depends on the size of the discretized environment. These limitations restrict these approaches from scaling to large problems. We present a novel formulation to the SP problem based on variational approximation that can be optimized using gradient descent, allowing us to efficiently find solutions in continuous domains. We generalize our method to also handle discrete environments. Our experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach generates sensor placements consistently on par with or better than the prior state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both MI and reconstruction quality, all while being significantly faster. Our computationally efficient approach enables both large-scale sensor placement and fast robotic sensor placement for informative path planning algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_00028
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Sensor Placement from Regression with Sparse Gaussian Processes in Continuous and Discrete Spaces
Jakkala, Kalvik
Akella, Srinivas
Robotics
Machine Learning
The sensor placement problem is a common problem that arises when monitoring correlated phenomena, such as temperature, precipitation, and salinity. Existing approaches to this problem typically formulate it as the maximization of information metrics, such as mutual information~(MI), and use optimization methods such as greedy algorithms in discrete domains, and derivative-free optimization methods such as genetic algorithms in continuous domains. However, computing MI for sensor placement requires discretizing the environment, and its computation cost depends on the size of the discretized environment. These limitations restrict these approaches from scaling to large problems. We present a novel formulation to the SP problem based on variational approximation that can be optimized using gradient descent, allowing us to efficiently find solutions in continuous domains. We generalize our method to also handle discrete environments. Our experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach generates sensor placements consistently on par with or better than the prior state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both MI and reconstruction quality, all while being significantly faster. Our computationally efficient approach enables both large-scale sensor placement and fast robotic sensor placement for informative path planning algorithms.
title Efficient Sensor Placement from Regression with Sparse Gaussian Processes in Continuous and Discrete Spaces
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00028