Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization

Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization

Erik Daxberger, Anastasia Makarova, Matteo Turchetta, Andreas Krause

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2633-2639. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/365

The optimization of expensive to evaluate, black-box, mixed-variable functions, i.e. functions that have continuous and discrete inputs, is a difficult and yet pervasive problem in science and engineering. In Bayesian optimization (BO), special cases of this problem that consider fully continuous or fully discrete domains have been widely studied. However, few methods exist for mixed-variable domains and none of them can handle discrete constraints that arise in many real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce MiVaBo, a novel BO algorithm for the efficient optimization of mixed-variable functions combining a linear surrogate model based on expressive feature representations with Thompson sampling. We propose an effective method to optimize its acquisition function, a challenging problem for mixed-variable domains, making MiVaBo the first BO method that can handle complex constraints over the discrete variables. Moreover, we provide the first convergence analysis of a mixed-variable BO algorithm. Finally, we show that MiVaBo is significantly more sample efficient than state-of-the-art mixed-variable BO algorithms on several hyperparameter tuning tasks, including the tuning of deep generative models.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Bayesian Optimization
Machine Learning: Active Learning
Machine Learning: Probabilistic Machine Learning