V arious algorithms have been proposed for robust estimation in generalized linear models.

Locally weighted regression (LWR) was created as a nonparametric method that can approximate a wide range of functions, is computationally efficient, and can learn continually from very large amounts of incrementally collected data.

Locally weighted regression (LWR) was created as a nonparametric method that can approximate a wide range of functions, is computationally efficient, and can learn continually from very large amounts of incrementally collected data.

With the rising complexity of numerous novel applications that serve our modern society comes the strong need to design efficient computing platforms. Designing efficient hardware is, however, a complex multi-objective problem that deals with multiple parameters and their interactions. Given that there are a large number of parameters and objectives involved in hardware design, synthesizing all possible combinations is not a feasible method to find the optimal solution. One promising approach to tackle this problem is statistical modeling of a desired hardware performance. Here, we propose a model-based active learning approach to solve this problem. Our proposed method uses Bayesian models to characterize various aspects of hardware performance. We also use transfer learning and Gaussian regression bootstrapping techniques in conjunction with active learning to create more accurate models. Our proposed statistical modeling method provides hardware models that are sufficiently accurate to perform design space exploration as well as performance prediction simultaneously. We use our proposed method to perform design space exploration and performance prediction for various hardware setups, such as micro-architecture design and OpenCL kernels for FPGA targets. Our experiments show that the number of samples required to create performance models significantly reduces while maintaining the predictive power of our proposed statistical models. For instance, in our performance prediction setting, the proposed method needs 65% fewer samples to create the model, and in the design space exploration setting, our proposed method can find the best parameter settings by exploring less than 50 samples.

We present a competitive analysis of some non-parametric Bayesian al- gorithms in a worst-case online learning setting, where no probabilistic assumptions about the generation of the data are made. We consider models which use a Gaussian process prior (over the space of all func- tions) and provide bounds on the regret (under the log loss) for com- monly used non-parametric Bayesian algorithms -- including Gaussian regression and logistic regression -- which show how these algorithms can perform favorably under rather general conditions. These bounds ex- plicitly handle the infinite dimensionality of these non-parametric classes in a natural way. We also make formal connections to the minimax and minimum description length (MDL) framework. Here, we show precisely how Bayesian Gaussian regression is a minimax strategy.

Locally weighted regression (LWR) was created as a nonparametric method that can approximate a wide range of functions, is computationally efficient, and can learn continually from very large amounts of incrementally collected data. As an interesting feature, LWR can regress on non-stationary functions, a beneficial property, for instance, in control problems. However, it does not provide a proper generative model for function values, and existing algorithms have a variety of manual tuning parameters that strongly influence bias, variance and learning speed of the results. Gaussian (process) regression, on the other hand, does provide a generative model with rather black-box automatic parameter tuning, but it has higher computational cost, especially for big data sets and if a non-stationary model is required. In this paper, we suggest a path from Gaussian (process) regression to locally weighted regression, where we retain the best of both approaches. Using a localizing function basis and approximate inference techniques, we build a Gaussian (process) regression algorithm of increasingly local nature and similar computational complexity to LWR. Empirical evaluations are performed on several synthetic and real robot datasets of increasing complexity and (big) data scale, and demonstrate that we consistently achieve on par or superior performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods while retaining a principled approach to fast incremental regression with minimal manual tuning parameters.

We present a competitive analysis of some nonparametric Bayesian algorithms in a worst-case online learning setting, where no probabilistic assumptions about the generation of the data are made. We consider models which use a Gaussian process prior (over the space of all functions) and provide bounds on the regret (under the log loss) for commonly used nonparametric Bayesian algorithms -- including Gaussian regression and logistic regression -- which show how these algorithms can perform favorably under rather general conditions. These bounds explicitly handle the infinite dimensionality of these nonparametric classes in a natural way. We also make formal connections to the minimax and minimum description length (MDL) framework. Here, we show precisely how Bayesian Gaussian regression is a minimax strategy.

We present a competitive analysis of some nonparametric Bayesian algorithms in a worst-case online learning setting, where no probabilistic assumptions about the generation of the data are made. We consider models which use a Gaussian process prior (over the space of all functions) and provide bounds on the regret (under the log loss) for commonly used nonparametric Bayesian algorithms -- including Gaussian regression and logistic regression -- which show how these algorithms can perform favorably under rather general conditions. These bounds explicitly handle the infinite dimensionality of these nonparametric classes in a natural way. We also make formal connections to the minimax and minimum description length (MDL) framework. Here, we show precisely how Bayesian Gaussian regression is a minimax strategy.

Dean P. Foster University of Pennsylvania We present a competitive analysis of some nonparametric Bayesian algorithms ina worst-case online learning setting, where no probabilistic assumptions about the generation of the data are made. We consider models which use a Gaussian process prior (over the space of all functions) andprovide bounds on the regret (under the log loss) for commonly usednon-parametric Bayesian algorithms -- including Gaussian regression and logistic regression -- which show how these algorithms can perform favorably under rather general conditions.