GoGP: fast online regression with Gaussian processes

One of the most current challenging problems in Gaussian process regression (GPR) is to handle large-scale datasets and to accommodate an online learning setting where data arrive irregularly on the fly. In this paper, we introduce a novel online Gaussian process model that could scale with massive datasets. Our approach is formulated based on alternative representation of the Gaussian process under geometric and optimization views, hence termed geometric-based online GP (GoGP). We developed theory to guarantee that with a good convergence rate our proposed algorithm always produces a (sparse) solution which is close to the true optima to any arbitrary level of approximation accuracy specified a priori. Furthermore, our method is proven to scale seamlessly not only with large-scale datasets, but also to adapt accurately with streaming data. We extensively evaluated our proposed model against state-of-the-art baselines using several large-scale datasets for online regression task. The experimental results show that our GoGP delivered comparable, or slightly better, predictive performance while achieving a magnitude of computational speedup compared with its rivals under online setting. More importantly, its convergence behavior is guaranteed through our theoretical analysis, which is rapid and stable while achieving lower errors.