Efficient multi-fidelity Gaussian process regression for noisy outputs and non-nested experimental designs

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-fidelity Gaussian process surrogate modeling that generalizes the recursive formulation of the auto-regressive model when the high-fidelity and low-fidelity data sets are noisy and not necessarily nested. The estimation of high-fidelity parameters by the EM (expectation-maximization) algorithm is shown to be still possible in this context and a closed-form update formula is derived when the scaling factor is a parametric linear predictor function. This yields a decoupled optimization strategy for the parameter selection that is more efficient and scalable than the direct maximum likelihood maximization. The proposed approach is compared to other multi-fidelity models, and benchmarks for different application cases of increasing complexity are provided.