Gaussian processes (GPs) are typically criticised for their unfavourable scaling in both computational and memory requirements. For large datasets, sparse GPs reduce these demands by conditioning on a small set of inducing variables designed to summarise the data. In practice however, for large datasets requiring many inducing variables, such as low-lengthscale spatial data, even sparse GPs can become computationally expensive, limited by the number of inducing variables one can use. In this work, we propose a new class of inter-domain variational GP, constructed by projecting a GP onto a set of compactly supported B-spline basis functions. The key benefit of our approach is that the compact support of the B-spline basis functions admits the use of sparse linear algebra to significantly speed up matrix operations and drastically reduce the memory footprint. This allows us to very efficiently model fast-varying spatial phenomena with tens of thousands of inducing variables, where previous approaches failed.

本文提出了一种将高斯过程映射到基于B样条基函数的一组函数上的新的跨域变分高斯过程。该方法的关键优势在于B样条基函数具有紧凑支持，可以采用稀疏线性代数来加速矩阵运算并显着减少内存占用，从而实现高效地对快速变化的空间现象进行建模，涉及数万个感应变量。

实际稀疏变分高斯过程