Transport Gaussian Processes for Regression

Abstract

Gaussian process (GP) priors are non-parametric generative models with appealing modelling properties for Bayesian inference: they can model non-linear relationships through noisy observations, have closed-form expressions for training and inference, and are governed by interpretable hyperparameters. However, GP models rely on Gaussianity, an assumption that does not hold in several real-world scenarios, e.g., when observations are bounded or have extreme-value dependencies, a natural phenomenon in physics, finance and social sciences. Although beyond-Gaussian stochastic processes have caught the attention of the GP community, a principled definition and rigorous treatment is still lacking. In this regard, we propose a methodology to construct stochastic processes, which include GPs, warped GPs, Student-t processes and several others under a single unified approach. We also provide formulas and algorithms for training and inference of the proposed models in the regression problem. Our approach is inspired by layers-based models, where each proposed layer changes a specific property over the generated stochastic process. That, in turn, allows us to push-forward a standard Gaussian white noise prior towards other more expressive stochastic processes, for which marginals and copulas need not be Gaussian, while retaining the appealing properties of GPs. We validate the proposed model through experiments with real-world data.