SEEK: Self-adaptive Explainable Kernel For Nonstationary Gaussian Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Negarandeh, Nima, Mora, Carlos, Bostanabad, Ramin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Negarandeh, Nima
Mora, Carlos
Bostanabad, Ramin
author_facet Negarandeh, Nima
Mora, Carlos
Bostanabad, Ramin
contents Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful probabilistic models that define flexible priors over functions, offering strong interpretability and uncertainty quantification. However, GP models often rely on simple, stationary kernels which can lead to suboptimal predictions and miscalibrated uncertainty estimates, especially in nonstationary real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce SEEK, a novel class of learnable kernels to model complex, nonstationary functions via GPs. Inspired by artificial neurons, SEEK is derived from first principles to ensure symmetry and positive semi-definiteness, key properties of valid kernels. The proposed method achieves flexible and adaptive nonstationarity by learning a mapping from a set of base kernels. Compared to existing techniques, our approach is more interpretable and much less prone to overfitting. We conduct comprehensive sensitivity analyses and comparative studies to demonstrate that our approach is not only robust to many of its design choices, but also outperforms existing stationary/nonstationary kernels in both mean prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14785
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEEK: Self-adaptive Explainable Kernel For Nonstationary Gaussian Processes
Negarandeh, Nima
Mora, Carlos
Bostanabad, Ramin
Machine Learning
Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful probabilistic models that define flexible priors over functions, offering strong interpretability and uncertainty quantification. However, GP models often rely on simple, stationary kernels which can lead to suboptimal predictions and miscalibrated uncertainty estimates, especially in nonstationary real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce SEEK, a novel class of learnable kernels to model complex, nonstationary functions via GPs. Inspired by artificial neurons, SEEK is derived from first principles to ensure symmetry and positive semi-definiteness, key properties of valid kernels. The proposed method achieves flexible and adaptive nonstationarity by learning a mapping from a set of base kernels. Compared to existing techniques, our approach is more interpretable and much less prone to overfitting. We conduct comprehensive sensitivity analyses and comparative studies to demonstrate that our approach is not only robust to many of its design choices, but also outperforms existing stationary/nonstationary kernels in both mean prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
title SEEK: Self-adaptive Explainable Kernel For Nonstationary Gaussian Processes
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14785