BARK: A Fully Bayesian Tree Kernel for Black-box Optimization

Abstract: We perform Bayesian optimization using a Gaussian process perspective on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). Our BART Kernel (BARK) uses tree agreement to define a posterior over piecewise-constant functions, and we explore the space of tree kernels using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. Where BART only samples functions, the resulting BARK model obtains samples of Gaussian processes defining distributions over functions, which allow us to build acquisition functions for Bayesian optimization. Our tree-based approach enables global optimization over the surrogate, even for mixed-feature spaces. Moreover, where many previous tree-based kernels provide uncertainty quantification over function values, our sampling scheme captures uncertainty over the tree structure itself. Our experiments show the strong performance of BARK on both synthetic and applied benchmarks, due to the combination of our fully Bayesian surrogate and the optimization procedure.