Papers › Variational Learning on Aggregate Outputs with Gaussian Processes

Variational Learning on Aggregate Outputs with Gaussian Processes

22 May 2018NeurIPS 2018 12arXiv:1805.08463archive 2025-07-28

Ho Chung Leon Law, Dino Sejdinovic, Ewan Cameron, Tim CD Lucas, Seth Flaxman, Katherine Battle, Kenji Fukumizu

While a typical supervised learning framework assumes that the inputs and the outputs are measured at the same levels of granularity, many applications, including global mapping of disease, only have access to outputs at a much coarser level than that of the inputs. Aggregation of outputs makes generalization to new inputs much more difficult. We consider an approach to this problem based on variational learning with a model of output aggregation and Gaussian processes, where aggregation leads to intractability of the standard evidence lower bounds. We propose new bounds and tractable approximations, leading to improved prediction accuracy and scalability to large datasets, while explicitly taking uncertainty into account. We develop a framework which extends to several types of likelihoods, including the Poisson model for aggregated count data. We apply our framework to a challenging and important problem, the fine-scale spatial modelling of malaria incidence, with over 1 million observations.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

hcllaw/VBAgg mentioned on GitHubtfNOASSERTION report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Gaussian Processes

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections