Good practices for Bayesian Optimization of high dimensional structured spaces

Author(s): Eero Siivola, Javier Gonzalez, Andrei Paleyes, Aki Vehtari
Venue: arXiv
Year: 2020

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15471

Abstract

The increasing availability of structured but high dimensional data has opened new opportunities for optimization. One emerging and promising avenue is the exploration of unsupervised methods for projecting structured high dimensional data into low dimensional continuous representations, simplifying the optimization problem and enabling the application of traditional optimization methods. However, this line of research has been purely methodological with little connection to the needs of practitioners so far. In this paper, we study the effect of different search space design choices for performing Bayesian Optimization in high dimensional structured datasets. In particular, we analyse the influence of the dimensionality of the latent space, the role of the acquisition function and evaluate new methods to automatically define the optimization bounds in the latent space. Finally, based on experimental results using synthetic and real datasets, we provide recommendations for the practitioners.

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