Marginalised Gaussian Processes with Nested Sampling

Abstract: Gaussian Process (GPs) models are a rich distribution over functions with inductive biases controlled by a kernel function. Learning occurs through the optimisation of kernel hyperparameters using the marginal likelihood as the objective. This classical approach known as Type-II maximum likelihood (ML-II) yields point estimates of the hyperparameters, and continues to be the default method for training GPs. However, this approach risks underestimating predictive uncertainty and is prone to overfitting especially when there are many hyperparameters. Furthermore, gradient based optimisation makes ML-II point estimates highly susceptible to the presence of local minima. This work presents an alternative learning procedure where the hyperparameters of the kernel function are marginalised using Nested Sampling (NS), a technique that is well suited to sample from complex, multi-modal distributions. We focus on regression tasks with the spectral mixture (SM) class of kernels and find that a principled approach to quantifying model uncertainty leads to substantial gains in predictive performance across a range of synthetic and benchmark data sets. In this context, nested sampling is also found to offer a speed advantage over Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), widely considered to be the gold-standard in MCMC based inference.