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Tabular GP

The aim of this repository is to make it easy to use gaussian process on tabular data, as a drop-in replacement for neural networks, with an implementation built on top of pytorch and the fastai (V2) framework.

Gaussian process have three main properties that makes them of particular interest:

• they are very accurate, and tend to outperform deep neural network, on small datasets (5000 points or less)
• they gives an uncertainty estimate on their outputs
• they are naturally resistant to overfitting

If you are a gaussian process expert, you might be better served by gpytorch as our focus is on accesibility and out-of-the-box experiences rather than exhaustivity and flexibility.

Usage

You can install our librarie with:

pip install git+https://github.com/nestordemeure/tabularGP.git

Our API was built to be compatible with fastai's tabular models and should be familiar to fastai's users:

# train a learner on a classification task using a subset of 50 points
learn = tabularGP_learner(data, nb_training_points=50, metrics=accuracy)
learn.fit_one_cycle(10, max_lr=1e-3)

# display the importance of each feature
learn.plot_feature_importance()

We recommand browsing the example folder to become familiar with the features available (including various forms of transfer-learning and feature importance estimation) before using the librarie.

Notes

The Gaussian process can produce a standard diviation to model the uncertainty on its output. We store this information in a .stdev member of the output of out forward function in order to use it in the loss functions. However, fastai erase this information when calling the predict function instead of calling forward directly.

Some inputs might lead to crash due to singular matrices appearing during the kernel computation. The easiest solution to solve those problems is to restart the model with a lower learning rate (adding training points can also help).

We provide two loss functions out of the box (gp_gaussian_marginal_log_likelihood for regression and gp_is_greater_log_likelihood for classification). Any user-defined loss function should take both mean and std into account to insure a proper fit.

One might observe that a validation metric increases while the loss steadily decreases. This is due to the model improving its uncertainty estimate to the detriment of its prediction.

Citation

If you use tabularGP in a scientific publication, you can cite the following reference:

@software{nestor_demeure_2020_3723068,
  author       = {Nestor Demeure},
  title        = {tabularGP},
  month        = mar,
  year         = 2020,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.3723068},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3723068}
}

For more unofficial fastai extensions, see the Fastai Extensions Repository.