Student-t Process Regression with Student-t Likelihood

Student-t Process Regression with Student-t Likelihood

Qingtao Tang, Li Niu, Yisen Wang, Tao Dai, Wangpeng An, Jianfei Cai, Shu-Tao Xia

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2822-2828. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/393

Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is a powerful Bayesian method. However, the performance of GPR can be significantly degraded when the training data are contaminated by outliers, including target outliers and input outliers. Although there are some variants of GPR (e.g., GPR with Student-t likelihood (GPRT)) aiming to handle outliers, most of the variants focus on handling the target outliers while little effort has been done to deal with the input outliers. In contrast, in this work, we aim to handle both the target outliers and the input outliers at the same time. Specifically, we replace the Gaussian noise in GPR with independent Student-t noise to cope with the target outliers. Moreover, to enhance the robustness w.r.t. the input outliers, we use a Student-t Process prior instead of the common Gaussian Process prior, leading to Student-t Process Regression with Student-t Likelihood (TPRT). We theoretically show that TPRT is more robust to both input and target outliers than GPR and GPRT, and prove that both GPR and GPRT are special cases of TPRT. Various experiments demonstrate that TPRT outperforms GPR and its variants on both synthetic and real datasets.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Kernel Methods
Machine Learning: Machine Learning