Sparse Variational Student-t Processes for Heavy-tailed Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Jian, Zeng, Delu, Paisley, John
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xu, Jian
Zeng, Delu
Paisley, John
author_facet Xu, Jian
Zeng, Delu
Paisley, John
contents The Gaussian process (GP) is a powerful tool for nonparametric modeling, but its sensitivity to outliers limits its applicability to data distributions with heavy-tails. Studentt processes offer a robust alternative for heavy tail modeling, but they lack the scalable developments of the GP to large datasets necessary for practical applications. We present Sparse Variational Student-t Processes (SVTP), the first principled framework that extends the sparse inducing point method to the Student-t process. We develop two novel inference algorithms, SVTP-UB and SVTP-MC, with theoretical guarantees, and derive a natural gradient optimization that exploits a previously unused connection between the Fisher information matrix of the multivariate Student-t distribution and the beta function (the 'beta link'). Experiments on UCI and Kaggle datasets demonstrate that SVTP significantly outperforms sparse GPs on when the data is contains outliers and heavy tails, achieving up to 3 times faster convergence and 40% lower prediction error while maintaining computational efficiency for datasets with over 200,000 samples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06699
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparse Variational Student-t Processes for Heavy-tailed Modeling
Xu, Jian
Zeng, Delu
Paisley, John
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The Gaussian process (GP) is a powerful tool for nonparametric modeling, but its sensitivity to outliers limits its applicability to data distributions with heavy-tails. Studentt processes offer a robust alternative for heavy tail modeling, but they lack the scalable developments of the GP to large datasets necessary for practical applications. We present Sparse Variational Student-t Processes (SVTP), the first principled framework that extends the sparse inducing point method to the Student-t process. We develop two novel inference algorithms, SVTP-UB and SVTP-MC, with theoretical guarantees, and derive a natural gradient optimization that exploits a previously unused connection between the Fisher information matrix of the multivariate Student-t distribution and the beta function (the 'beta link'). Experiments on UCI and Kaggle datasets demonstrate that SVTP significantly outperforms sparse GPs on when the data is contains outliers and heavy tails, achieving up to 3 times faster convergence and 40% lower prediction error while maintaining computational efficiency for datasets with over 200,000 samples.
title Sparse Variational Student-t Processes for Heavy-tailed Modeling
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06699