Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization Without a Metronome

Anthony Bardou; Patrick Thiran

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arXiv · 2501.18963

Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization Without a Metronome

Anthony Bardou·Patrick Thiran

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Abstract

Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization (TVBO) is the go-to framework for optimizing a time-varying, expensive, noisy black-box function $f$. However, most of the asymptotic guarantees offered by TVBO algorithms rely on the assumption that observations are acquired at a constant frequency. As the GP inference complexity scales with the cube of its dataset size, this assumption is unrealistic in the long run. In this paper, we relax this assumption and derive the first upper regret bound that explicitly accounts for changes in the observations sampling frequency. Based on this analysis, we formulate practical recommendations about dataset sizes and stale data policies of TVBO algorithms. We illustrate how an algorithm (BOLT) that follows these recommendations performs better than the state-of-the-art of TVBO through experiments on synthetic and real-world problems.

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BibTeX RIS

Anthony Bardou, Patrick Thiran. 2025-01-31. Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization Without a Metronome. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18963

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