Theo Galy-Fajou

Florian Wenzel, Theo Galy-Fajou, Christan Donner et al.

We propose a scalable stochastic variational approach to GP classification building on Polya-Gamma data augmentation and inducing points. Unlike former approaches, we obtain closed-form updates based on natural gradients that lead to efficient optimization. We evaluate the algorithm on real-world datasets containing up to 11 million data points and demonstrate that it is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art while being competitive in terms of prediction performance.

Florian Wenzel, Theo Galy-Fajou, Matthaeus Deutsch et al.

We propose a fast inference method for Bayesian nonlinear support vector machines that leverages stochastic variational inference and inducing points. Our experiments show that the proposed method is faster than competing Bayesian approaches and scales easily to millions of data points. It provides additional features over frequentist competitors such as accurate predictive uncertainty estimates and automatic hyperparameter search.