Gaussian processes are a promising nonlinear regression tool, but it is not straightforward to solve classification problems with them. In this paper the variational methods of Jaakkola and Jordan are applied to Gaussian processes to produce an efficient Bayesian binary classifier.

We introduce a new statistical modelling technique for building occupancy maps. The problem of mapping is addressed as a classification task where the robot’s environment is classified into regions of occupancy and free space. This is obtained by employing a modified Gaussian process as a non-parametric Bayesian learning technique to exploit the fact that realworld environments inherently posse...

Many applications in computer vision and computer graphics require the definition of curves and surfaces. Implicit surfaces [7] are a popular choice for this because they are smooth, can be appropriately constrained by known geometry, and require no special treatment for topology changes. Given a scalar function f : Rd 7→ R, one can define a manifold S of dimension d− 1 wherever f(x) passes thr...

The framework of graphical models is a cornerstone of applied Statistics, allowing for an intuitive graphical specification of the main features of a model, and providing a basis for general Bayesian inference computations though belief propagation (BP). In the latter, messages are passed between marginal beliefs of groups of variables. In parametric models, where all variables are of fixed fin...

We introduce Latent Gaussian Process Regression which is a latent variable extension allowing modelling of non-stationary processes using stationary GP priors. The approach is built on extending the input space of a regression problem with a latent variable that is used to modulate the covariance function over the input space. We show how our approach can be used to model non-stationary process...

Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference, and it has been recently applied for representation learning with deep generative models. We develop the variational Gaussian process (VGP), a Bayesian nonparametric variational family, which adapts its shape to match complex posterior distributions. The VGP generates approximate posterior samples by generating latent inputs an...

Bayesian approaches to preference elicitation (PE) are particularly attractive due to their ability to explicitly model uncertainty in users’ latent utility functions. However, previous approaches to Bayesian PE have ignored the important problem of generalizing from previous users to an unseen user in order to reduce the elicitation burden on new users. In this paper, we address this deficienc...

The prediction of time-changing variances is an important task in the modeling of financial data. Standard econometric models are often limited as they assume rigid functional relationships for the evolution of the variance. Moreover, functional parameters are usually learned by maximum likelihood, which can lead to overfitting. To address these problems we introduce GP-Vol, a novel non-paramet...

Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference, and it has been recently applied for representation learning with deep generative models. We develop the variational Gaussian process (VGP), a Bayesian nonparametric variational family, which adapts its shape to match complex posterior distributions. The VGP generates approximate posterior samples by generating latent inputs an...

This paper introduces Gaussian Process Dynamical Models (GPDM) for nonlinear time series analysis. A GPDM comprises a low-dimensional latent space with associated dynamics, and a map from the latent space to an observation space. We marginalize out the model parameters in closed-form, which amounts to using Gaussian Process (GP) priors for both the dynamics and the observation mappings. This re...