Linear-Cost Vecchia Approximation of Multivariate Normal Probabilities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cao, Jian, Katzfuss, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Cao, Jian
Katzfuss, Matthias
author_facet Cao, Jian
Katzfuss, Matthias
contents Multivariate normal (MVN) probabilities arise in myriad applications, but they are analytically intractable and need to be evaluated via Monte-Carlo-based numerical integration. For the state-of-the-art minimax exponential tilting (MET) method, we show that the complexity of each of its components can be greatly reduced through an integrand parameterization that utilizes the sparse inverse Cholesky factor produced by the Vecchia approximation, whose approximation error is often negligible relative to the Monte-Carlo error. Based on this idea, we derive algorithms that can estimate MVN probabilities and sample from truncated MVN distributions in linear time (and that are easily parallelizable) at the same convergence or acceptance rate as MET, whose complexity is cubic in the dimension of the MVN probability. We showcase the advantages of our methods relative to existing approaches using several simulated examples. We also analyze a groundwater-contamination dataset with over twenty thousand censored measurements to demonstrate the scalability of our method for partially censored Gaussian-process models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09426
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Linear-Cost Vecchia Approximation of Multivariate Normal Probabilities
Cao, Jian
Katzfuss, Matthias
Computation
Multivariate normal (MVN) probabilities arise in myriad applications, but they are analytically intractable and need to be evaluated via Monte-Carlo-based numerical integration. For the state-of-the-art minimax exponential tilting (MET) method, we show that the complexity of each of its components can be greatly reduced through an integrand parameterization that utilizes the sparse inverse Cholesky factor produced by the Vecchia approximation, whose approximation error is often negligible relative to the Monte-Carlo error. Based on this idea, we derive algorithms that can estimate MVN probabilities and sample from truncated MVN distributions in linear time (and that are easily parallelizable) at the same convergence or acceptance rate as MET, whose complexity is cubic in the dimension of the MVN probability. We showcase the advantages of our methods relative to existing approaches using several simulated examples. We also analyze a groundwater-contamination dataset with over twenty thousand censored measurements to demonstrate the scalability of our method for partially censored Gaussian-process models.
title Linear-Cost Vecchia Approximation of Multivariate Normal Probabilities
topic Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09426