Efficient Level-Crossing Probability Calculation for Gaussian Process Modeled Data
This addresses computational bottlenecks in uncertainty visualization for scientific data modeled with GPR, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing probabilistic marching cubes approaches.
The paper tackles the high computational complexity of level-crossing probability calculations for Gaussian process regression (GPR) models by developing a hierarchical spatial subdivision method that adaptively reconstructs only regions with non-zero probability, achieving accurate results with low computation cost in experiments.
Almost all scientific data have uncertainties originating from different sources. Gaussian process regression (GPR) models are a natural way to model data with Gaussian-distributed uncertainties. GPR also has the benefit of reducing I/O bandwidth and storage requirements for large scientific simulations. However, the reconstruction from the GPR models suffers from high computation complexity. To make the situation worse, classic approaches for visualizing the data uncertainties, like probabilistic marching cubes, are also computationally very expensive, especially for data of high resolutions. In this paper, we accelerate the level-crossing probability calculation efficiency on GPR models by subdividing the data spatially into a hierarchical data structure and only reconstructing values adaptively in the regions that have a non-zero probability. For each region, leveraging the known GPR kernel and the saved data observations, we propose a novel approach to efficiently calculate an upper bound for the level-crossing probability inside the region and use this upper bound to make the subdivision and reconstruction decisions. We demonstrate that our value occurrence probability estimation is accurate with a low computation cost by experiments that calculate the level-crossing probability fields on different datasets.