Incremental Structure Discovery of Classification via Sequential Monte Carlo
This work addresses the need for adaptive classification models in online applications where data features may shift, though it is incremental as it extends an existing technique to handle extra latent variables.
The paper tackles the problem of requiring strong prior knowledge for Gaussian Process classification in online settings by introducing a method that automatically discovers classification models from sequentially arriving data, achieving a 10% accuracy improvement on a real-world benchmark.
Gaussian Processes (GPs) provide a powerful framework for making predictions and understanding uncertainty for classification with kernels and Bayesian non-parametric learning. Building such models typically requires strong prior knowledge to define preselect kernels, which could be ineffective for online applications of classification that sequentially process data because features of data may shift during the process. To alleviate the requirement of prior knowledge used in GPs and learn new features from data that arrive successively, this paper presents a novel method to automatically discover models of classification on complex data with little prior knowledge. Our method adapts a recently proposed technique for GP-based time-series structure discovery, which integrates GPs and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). We extend the technique to handle extra latent variables in GP classification, such that our method can effectively and adaptively learn a-priori unknown structures of classification from continuous input. In addition, our method adapts new batch of data with updated structures of models. Our experiments show that our method is able to automatically incorporate various features of kernels on synthesized data and real-world data for classification. In the experiments of real-world data, our method outperforms various classification methods on both online and offline setting achieving a 10\% accuracy improvement on one benchmark.