Error Bounds For Gaussian Process Regression Under Bounded Support Noise With Applications To Safety Certification

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Reed, Robert, Laurenti, Luca, Lahijanian, Morteza
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929641592193024
author Reed, Robert
Laurenti, Luca
Lahijanian, Morteza
author_facet Reed, Robert
Laurenti, Luca
Lahijanian, Morteza
contents Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is a powerful and elegant method for learning complex functions from noisy data with a wide range of applications, including in safety-critical domains. Such applications have two key features: (i) they require rigorous error quantification, and (ii) the noise is often bounded and non-Gaussian due to, e.g., physical constraints. While error bounds for applying GPR in the presence of non-Gaussian noise exist, they tend to be overly restrictive and conservative in practice. In this paper, we provide novel error bounds for GPR under bounded support noise. Specifically, by relying on concentration inequalities and assuming that the latent function has low complexity in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) corresponding to the GP kernel, we derive both probabilistic and deterministic bounds on the error of the GPR. We show that these errors are substantially tighter than existing state-of-the-art bounds and are particularly well-suited for GPR with neural network kernels, i.e., Deep Kernel Learning (DKL). Furthermore, motivated by applications in safety-critical domains, we illustrate how these bounds can be combined with stochastic barrier functions to successfully quantify the safety probability of an unknown dynamical system from finite data. We validate the efficacy of our approach through several benchmarks and comparisons against existing bounds. The results show that our bounds are consistently smaller, and that DKLs can produce error bounds tighter than sample noise, significantly improving the safety probability of control systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09033
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Error Bounds For Gaussian Process Regression Under Bounded Support Noise With Applications To Safety Certification
Reed, Robert
Laurenti, Luca
Lahijanian, Morteza
Machine Learning
Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is a powerful and elegant method for learning complex functions from noisy data with a wide range of applications, including in safety-critical domains. Such applications have two key features: (i) they require rigorous error quantification, and (ii) the noise is often bounded and non-Gaussian due to, e.g., physical constraints. While error bounds for applying GPR in the presence of non-Gaussian noise exist, they tend to be overly restrictive and conservative in practice. In this paper, we provide novel error bounds for GPR under bounded support noise. Specifically, by relying on concentration inequalities and assuming that the latent function has low complexity in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) corresponding to the GP kernel, we derive both probabilistic and deterministic bounds on the error of the GPR. We show that these errors are substantially tighter than existing state-of-the-art bounds and are particularly well-suited for GPR with neural network kernels, i.e., Deep Kernel Learning (DKL). Furthermore, motivated by applications in safety-critical domains, we illustrate how these bounds can be combined with stochastic barrier functions to successfully quantify the safety probability of an unknown dynamical system from finite data. We validate the efficacy of our approach through several benchmarks and comparisons against existing bounds. The results show that our bounds are consistently smaller, and that DKLs can produce error bounds tighter than sample noise, significantly improving the safety probability of control systems.
title Error Bounds For Gaussian Process Regression Under Bounded Support Noise With Applications To Safety Certification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09033