Title
On Sparse variational methods and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between stochastic processes
Abstract
The variational framework for learning inducing variables (Titsias, 2009a) has had a large impact on the Gaussian process literature. The framework may be interpreted as minimizing a rigorously defined Kullback-Leibler divergence between the approximating and posterior processes. To our knowledge this connection has thus far gone unremarked in the literature. In this paper we give a substantial generalization of the literature on this topic. We give a new proof of the result for infinite index sets which allows inducing points that are not data points and likelihoods that depend on all function values. We then discuss augmented index sets and show that, contrary to previous works, marginal consistency of augmentation is not enough to guarantee consistency of variational inference with the original model. We then characterize an extra condition where such a guarantee is obtainable. Finally we show how our framework sheds light on interdomain sparse approximations and sparse approximations for Cox processes.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings
Data point,Mathematical optimization,Divergence,Inference,Computer science,Index set,Stochastic process,Gaussian process,Artificial intelligence,Kullback–Leibler divergence,Machine learning
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
51
1938-7288
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
0.97
5
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexander Matthews1262.06
James Hensman226520.05
Richard E. Turner332237.95
Zoubin Ghahramani4104551264.39