Sparse inversion for derivative of log determinant

Abstract: Algorithms for Gaussian process, marginal likelihood methods or restricted maximum likelihood methods often require derivatives of log determinant terms. These log determinants are usually parametric with variance parameters of the underlying statistical models. This paper demonstrates that, when the underlying matrix is sparse, how to take the advantage of sparse inversion---selected inversion which share the same sparsity as the original matrix---to accelerate evaluating the derivative of log determinant.