Learning Gaussian Processes by Minimizing PAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018)

Bibtex Metadata Paper Reviews Supplemental

Authors

David Reeb, Andreas Doerr, Sebastian Gerwinn, Barbara Rakitsch

Abstract

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are a generic modelling tool for supervised learning. While they have been successfully applied on large datasets, their use in safety-critical applications is hindered by the lack of good performance guarantees. To this end, we propose a method to learn GPs and their sparse approximations by directly optimizing a PAC-Bayesian bound on their generalization performance, instead of maximizing the marginal likelihood. Besides its theoretical appeal, we find in our evaluation that our learning method is robust and yields significantly better generalization guarantees than other common GP approaches on several regression benchmark datasets.