Monotonic warpings for additive and deep Gaussian processes

Music City Center 

Gaussian processes (GPs) are canonical as surrogates for computer experiments because they enjoy a degree of analytic tractability. But that breaks when the response surface is constrained, say to be monotonic. Here, we provide a "mono-GP" construction for a single input that is highly efficient even though the calculations are non-analytic. Key ingredients include transformation of a reference process and elliptical slice sampling. We then show how mono-GP may be deployed effectively in two ways. One is additive, extending monotonicity to more inputs; the other is as a prior on injective latent warping variables in a deep Gaussian process for (non-monotonic, multi-input) non-stationary surrogate modeling. We provide illustrative and benchmarking examples throughout, showing that our methods yield improved performance over the state-of-the-art on examples from those two classes of problems.

computer experiment

surrogate modeling

constrained response surface

elliptical slice sampling

uncertainty quantification

Bayesian inference 

Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences