An Improved Bayesian Framework for Quadrature of Constrained Integrands.

Quadrature is the problem of estimating intractable integrals, a problem that arises in many Bayesian machine learning settings. We present an improved Bayesian framework for estimating intractable integrals of specific kinds of constrained integrands. We derive the necessary approximation scheme for a specific and especially useful instantiation of this framework: the use of a log transformation to model non-negative integrands. We also propose a novel method for optimizing the hyperparameters associated with this framework; we optimize the hyperparameters in the original space of the integrand as opposed to in the transformed space, resulting in a model that better explains the actual data. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves more-accurate estimates using less wall-clock time than previously preposed Bayesian quadrature procedures for non-negative integrands.