A Global-Local Approximation Framework for Large-Scale Gaussian Process Modeling

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel framework for large-scale Gaussian process (GP) modeling. Contrary to the global, and local approximations proposed in the literature to address the computational bottleneck with exact GP modeling, we employ a combined global-local approach in building the approximation. Our framework uses a subset-of-data approach where the subset is a union of a set of global points designed to capture the global trend in the data, and a set of local points specific to a given testing location to capture the local trend around the testing location. The correlation function is also modeled as a combination of a global, and a local kernel. The predictive performance of our framework, which we refer to as TwinGP, is comparable to the state-of-the-art GP modeling methods, but at a fraction of their computational cost.