Quadruply Stochastic Gaussian Processes

Abstract: We introduce a stochastic variational inference procedure for training scalable Gaussian process (GP) models whose per-iteration complexity is independent of both the number of training points, $n$, and the number basis functions used in the kernel approximation, $m$. Our central contributions include an unbiased stochastic estimator of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) for a Gaussian likelihood, as well as a stochastic estimator that lower bounds the ELBO for several other likelihoods such as Laplace and logistic. Independence of the stochastic optimization update complexity on $n$ and $m$ enables inference on huge datasets using large capacity GP models. We demonstrate accurate inference on large classification and regression datasets using GPs and relevance vector machines with up to $m = 10^7$ basis functions.