This was part of Expressing and Exploiting Structure in Modeling, Theory, and Computation with Gaussian Processes

Gaussian Process Regression Constrained by Boundary Value Problems

Mamikon Gulian, Sandia National Laboratories

Thursday, September 1, 2022



Abstract: As part of a broader effort in scientific machine learning, many recent works have incorporated physical constraints or other a priori information within Gaussian process regression to supplement limited data and regularize the behavior of the model. We provide an overview of several classes of constrained Gaussian processes and discuss some of their advantages and numerical properties. We then develop a framework for Gaussian processes regression constrained by boundary value problems. The framework may be applied to infer the solution of a well-posed boundary value problem with a known second-order differential operator and boundary conditions, but for which only scattered observations of the source term are available. Scattered observations of the solution may also be used in the regression. The framework combines co-kriging with the linear transformation of a Gaussian process together with the use of kernels given by spectral expansions in eigenfunctions of the boundary value problem. Thus, it benefits from a reduced-rank property of covariance matrices. We demonstrate that the resulting framework yields more accurate and stable solution inference as compared to physics-informed Gaussian process regression without boundary condition constraints.