Warped Gaussian Processes
Edward Snelson, CE Rasmussen, Zoubin Ghahramani, Thrun, L.K. Saul, B. Schölkopf · 2003
We generalise the Gaussian process (GP) framework for regression by learning a nonlinear transformation of the GP outputs. This allows for non-Gaussian processes and non-Gaussian noise. The learning algorithm chooses a nonlinear transformation such that transformed data is well-modelled by a GP. This can be seen as including a preprocessing transformation as an integral part of the probabilistic modelling problem, rather than as an ad-hoc step. We demonstrate on several real regression problems that learning the transformation can lead to significantly better performance than using a regular GP, or a GP with a fixed transformation.