This paper presents new quadrature rules for functions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space using nodes drawn by a sampling algorithm known as randomly pivoted Cholesky. The resulting computational procedure compares favorably to previous kernel quadrature methods, which either achieve low accuracy or require solving a computationally challenging sampling problem.

Consequently, there are no theoretical guarantees so far for this class of methods.

We study a quadrature, proposed by Ermakov and Zolotukhin in the sixties, through the lens of kernel methods. The nodes of this quadrature rule follow the distribution of a determinantal point process, while the weights are defined through a linear system, similarly to the optimal kernel quadrature. In this work, we show how these two classes of quadrature are related, and we prove a tractable formula of the expected value of the squared worst-case integration error on the unit ball of an RKHS of the former quadrature. In particular, this formula involves the eigenvalues of the corresponding kernel and leads to improving on the existing theoretical guarantees of the optimal kernel quadrature with determinantal point processes.

Calculation of Bayesian posteriors and model evidences typically requires numerical integration. Bayesian quadrature (BQ), a surrogate-model-based approach to numerical integration, is capable of superb sample efficiency, but its lack of parallelisation has hindered its practical applications. In this work, we propose a parallelised (batch) BQ method, employing techniques from kernel quadrature, that possesses an empirically exponential convergence rate.Additionally, just as with Nested Sampling, our method permits simultaneous inference of both posteriors and model evidence.Samples from our BQ surrogate model are re-selected to give a sparse set of samples, via a kernel recombination algorithm, requiring negligible additional time to increase the batch size.Empirically, we find that our approach significantly outperforms the sampling efficiency of both state-of-the-art BQ techniques and Nested Sampling in various real-world datasets, including lithium-ion battery analytics.

This paper addresses the challenging computational problem of estimating intractable expectations over discrete domains. Existing approaches, including Monte Carlo and Russian Roulette estimators, are consistent but often require a large number of samples to achieve accurate results. We propose a novel estimator, \emph{BayesSum}, which is an extension of Bayesian quadrature to discrete domains. It is more sample efficient than alternatives due to its ability to make use of prior information about the integrand through a Gaussian process. We show this through theory, deriving a convergence rate significantly faster than Monte Carlo in a broad range of settings. We also demonstrate empirically that our proposed method does indeed require fewer samples on several synthetic settings as well as for parameter estimation for Conway-Maxwell-Poisson and Potts models.

The computational model can be assessed through comparison of these predictions to test data generated from an experiment.

Kernel methods have recently attracted resurgent interest, showing performance competitive with deep neural networks in tasks such as speech recognition.

Kernel-based quadrature rules are becoming important in machine learning and statistics, as they achieve super-n convergence rates in numerical integration, and thus provide alternatives to Monte Carlo integration in challenging settings where integrands are expensive to evaluate or where integrands are high dimensional. These rules are based on the assumption that the integrand has a certain degree of smoothness, which is expressed as that the integrand belongs to a certain reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, this assumption can be violated in practice (e.g., when the integrand is a black box function), and no general theory has been established for the convergence of kernel quadratures in such misspecified settings. Our contribution is in proving that kernel quadratures can be consistent even when the integrand does not belong to the assumed RKHS, i.e., when the integrand is less smooth than assumed. Specifically, we derive convergence rates that depend on the (unknown) lesser smoothness of the integrand, where the degree of smoothness is expressed via powers of RKHSs or via Sobolev spaces.

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Probabilistic numerics casts numerical tasks, such the numerical solution of differential equations, as inference problems to be solved.