Surrogate models have shown to be an extremely efficient aid in solving engineering problems that require repeated evaluations of an expensive computational model. They are built by sparsely evaluating the costly original model and have provided a way to solve otherwise intractable problems. A crucial aspect in surrogate modelling is the assumption of smoothness and regularity of the model to approximate. This assumption is however not always met in reality. For instance in civil or mechanical engineering, some models may present discontinuities or non-smoothness, e.g., in case of instability patterns such as buckling or snap-through. Building a single surrogate model capable of accounting for these fundamentally different behaviors or discontinuities is not an easy task. In this paper, we propose a three-stage approach for the approximation of non-smooth functions which combines clustering, classification and regression. The idea is to split the space following the localized behaviors or regimes of the system and build local surrogates that are eventually assembled. A sequence of well-known machine learning techniques are used: Dirichlet process mixtures models (DPMM), support vector machines and Gaussian process modelling. The approach is tested and validated on two analytical functions and a finite element model of a tensile membrane structure.

Explicitly accounting for uncertainties is paramount to the safety of engineering structures. Optimization which is often carried out at the early stage of the structural design offers an ideal framework for this task. When the uncertainties are mainly affecting the objective function, robust design optimization is traditionally considered. This work further assumes the existence of multiple and competing objective functions that need to be dealt with simultaneously. The optimization problem is formulated by considering quantiles of the objective functions which allows for the combination of both optimality and robustness in a single metric. By introducing the concept of common random numbers, the resulting nested optimization problem may be solved using a general-purpose solver, herein the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). The computational cost of such an approach is however a serious hurdle to its application in real-world problems. We therefore propose a surrogate-assisted approach using Kriging as an inexpensive approximation of the associated computational model. The proposed approach consists of sequentially carrying out NSGA-II while using an adaptively built Kriging model to estimate the quantiles. Finally, the methodology is adapted to account for mixed categorical-continuous parameters as the applications involve the selection of qualitative design parameters as well. The methodology is first applied to two analytical examples showing its efficiency. The third application relates to the selection of optimal renovation scenarios of a building considering both its life cycle cost and environmental impact. It shows that when it comes to renovation, the heating system replacement should be the priority.

This paper presents a surrogate modelling technique based on domain partitioning for Bayesian parameter inference of highly nonlinear engineering models. In order to alleviate the computational burden typically involved in Bayesian inference applications, a multielement Polynomial Chaos Expansion based Kriging metamodel is proposed. The developed surrogate model combines in a piecewise function an array of local Polynomial Chaos based Kriging metamodels constructed on a finite set of non-overlapping subdomains of the stochastic input space. Therewith, the presence of non-smoothness in the response of the forward model (e.g.~ nonlinearities and sparseness) can be reproduced by the proposed metamodel with minimum computational costs owing to its local adaptation capabilities. The model parameter inference is conducted through a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach comprising adaptive exploration and delayed rejection. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach are validated through two case studies, including an analytical benchmark and a numerical case study. The latter relates the partial differential equation governing the hydrogen diffusion phenomenon of metallic materials in Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy tests.

We present the GPry algorithm for fast Bayesian inference of general (non-Gaussian) posteriors with a moderate number of parameters. GPry does not need any pre-training, special hardware such as GPUs, and is intended as a drop-in replacement for traditional Monte Carlo methods for Bayesian inference. Our algorithm is based on generating a Gaussian Process surrogate model of the log-posterior, aided by a Support Vector Machine classifier that excludes extreme or non-finite values. An active learning scheme allows us to reduce the number of required posterior evaluations by two orders of magnitude compared to traditional Monte Carlo inference. Our algorithm allows for parallel evaluations of the posterior at optimal locations, further reducing wall-clock times. We significantly improve performance using properties of the posterior in our active learning scheme and for the definition of the GP prior. In particular we account for the expected dynamical range of the posterior in different dimensionalities. We test our model against a number of synthetic and cosmological examples. GPry outperforms traditional Monte Carlo methods when the evaluation time of the likelihood (or the calculation of theoretical observables) is of the order of seconds; for evaluation times of over a minute it can perform inference in days that would take months using traditional methods. GPry is distributed as an open source Python package (pip install gpry) and can also be found at https://github.com/jonaselgammal/GPry.

我们提出了一种新的非参数混合物模型，用于多变量回归问题，灵感来自概率K-Nearthimest邻居算法。使用有条件指定的模型，对样本外输入的预测基于与每个观察到的数据点的相似性，从而产生高斯混合物表示的预测分布。在混合物组件的参数以及距离度量标准的参数上，使用平均场变化贝叶斯算法进行后推断，并具有基于随机梯度的优化过程。在与数据大小相比，输入 - 输出关系很复杂，预测分布可能偏向或多模式的情况下，输入相对较高的尺寸，该方法尤其有利。对五个数据集进行的计算研究，其中两个是合成生成的，这说明了我们的高维输入的专家混合物方法的明显优势，在验证指标和视觉检查方面都优于竞争者模型。

In a fissile material, the inherent multiplicity of neutrons born through induced fissions leads to correlations in their detection statistics. The correlations between neutrons can be used to trace back some characteristics of the fissile material. This technique known as neutron noise analysis has applications in nuclear safeguards or waste identification. It provides a non-destructive examination method for an unknown fissile material. This is an example of an inverse problem where the cause is inferred from observations of the consequences. However, neutron correlation measurements are often noisy because of the stochastic nature of the underlying processes. This makes the resolution of the inverse problem more complex since the measurements are strongly dependent on the material characteristics. A minor change in the material properties can lead to very different outputs. Such an inverse problem is said to be ill-posed. For an ill-posed inverse problem the inverse uncertainty quantification is crucial. Indeed, seemingly low noise in the data can lead to strong uncertainties in the estimation of the material properties. Moreover, the analytical framework commonly used to describe neutron correlations relies on strong physical assumptions and is thus inherently biased. This paper addresses dual goals. Firstly, surrogate models are used to improve neutron correlations predictions and quantify the errors on those predictions. Then, the inverse uncertainty quantification is performed to include the impact of measurement error alongside the residual model bias.

高斯流程是许多灵活的统计和机器学习模型的关键组成部分。但是，由于需要倒转和存储完整的协方差矩阵，它们表现出立方计算的复杂性和高内存约束。为了解决这个问题，已经考虑了高斯流程专家的混合物，其中数据点被分配给独立专家，从而通过允许基于较小的局部协方差矩阵来降低复杂性。此外，高斯流程专家的混合物大大富含模型的灵活性，从而允许诸如非平稳性，异方差和不连续性等行为。在这项工作中，我们基于嵌套的蒙特卡洛采样器构建了一种新颖的推理方法，以同时推断门控网络和高斯工艺专家参数。与重要性采样相比，这大大改善了推断，尤其是在固定高斯流程不合适的情况下，同时仍然完全平行。

引入了涉及高斯流程（GPS）的模型，以同时处理多个功能数据的多任务学习，聚类和预测。该过程充当了功能数据的基于模型的聚类方法，也是对新任务进行后续预测的学习步骤。该模型是将多任务GPS与常见平均过程的混合物实例化。得出了一种用于处理超参数的优化以及超构件对潜在变量和过程的估计的优化。我们建立了明确的公式，用于将平均过程和潜在聚类变量整合到预测分布中，这是两个方面的不确定性。该分布定义为集群特异性GP预测的混合物，在处理组结构数据时，可以增强性能。该模型处理观察的不规则网格，并提供了关于协方差结构的不同假设，用于在任务之间共享其他信息。聚类和预测任务上的性能将通过各种模拟方案和真实数据集进行评估。总体算法称为magmaclust，可公开作为R包。

Real engineering and scientific applications often involve one or more qualitative inputs. Standard Gaussian processes (GPs), however, cannot directly accommodate qualitative inputs. The recently introduced latent variable Gaussian process (LVGP) overcomes this issue by first mapping each qualitative factor to underlying latent variables (LVs), and then uses any standard GP covariance function over these LVs. The LVs are estimated similarly to the other GP hyperparameters through maximum likelihood estimation, and then plugged into the prediction expressions. However, this plug-in approach will not account for uncertainty in estimation of the LVs, which can be significant especially with limited training data. In this work, we develop a fully Bayesian approach for the LVGP model and for visualizing the effects of the qualitative inputs via their LVs. We also develop approximations for scaling up LVGPs and fully Bayesian inference for the LVGP hyperparameters. We conduct numerical studies comparing plug-in inference against fully Bayesian inference over a few engineering models and material design applications. In contrast to previous studies on standard GP modeling that have largely concluded that a fully Bayesian treatment offers limited improvements, our results show that for LVGP modeling it offers significant improvements in prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification over the plug-in approach.

由于其数据效率，贝叶斯优化已经出现在昂贵的黑盒优化的最前沿。近年来，关于新贝叶斯优化算法及其应用的发展的研究激增。因此，本文试图对贝叶斯优化的最新进展进行全面和更新的调查，并确定有趣的开放问题。我们将贝叶斯优化的现有工作分为九个主要群体，并根据所提出的算法的动机和重点。对于每个类别，我们介绍了替代模型的构建和采集功能的适应的主要进步。最后，我们讨论了开放的问题，并提出了有希望的未来研究方向，尤其是在分布式和联合优化系统中的异质性，隐私保护和公平性方面。

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning.

现代深度学习方法构成了令人难以置信的强大工具，以解决无数的挑战问题。然而，由于深度学习方法作为黑匣子运作，因此与其预测相关的不确定性往往是挑战量化。贝叶斯统计数据提供了一种形式主义来理解和量化与深度神经网络预测相关的不确定性。本教程概述了相关文献和完整的工具集，用于设计，实施，列车，使用和评估贝叶斯神经网络，即使用贝叶斯方法培训的随机人工神经网络。

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation involving the posterior density. In this paper, we review variational inference (VI), a method from machine learning that approximates probability densities through optimization. VI has been used in many applications and tends to be faster than classical methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. The idea behind VI is to first posit a family of densities and then to find the member of that family which is close to the target. Closeness is measured by Kullback-Leibler divergence. We review the ideas behind mean-field variational inference, discuss the special case of VI applied to exponential family models, present a full example with a Bayesian mixture of Gaussians, and derive a variant that uses stochastic optimization to scale up to massive data. We discuss modern research in VI and highlight important open problems. VI is powerful, but it is not yet well understood. Our hope in writing this paper is to catalyze statistical research on this class of algorithms.

The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often referred to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of attempts so far at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.

标准GPS为行为良好的流程提供了灵活的建模工具。然而，预计与高斯的偏差有望在现实世界数据集中出现，结构异常值和冲击通常会观察到。在这些情况下，GP可能无法充分建模不确定性，并且可能会过度推动。在这里，我们将GP框架扩展到一类新的时间变化的GP，从而可以直接建模重尾非高斯行为，同时通过非均匀GPS表示的无限混合物保留了可拖动的条件GP结构。有条件的GP结构是通过在潜在转化的输入空间上调节观测值来获得的，并使用L \'{e} Vy过程对潜在转化的随机演变进行建模，该过程允许贝叶斯在后端预测密度和潜在转化中的贝叶斯推断功能。我们为该模型提供了马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛推理程序，并证明了与标准GP相比的潜在好处。

替代模型用于减轻工程任务中的计算负担，这些计算负担需要重复评估计算要求的物理系统模型，例如不确定性的有效传播。对于显示出非常非线性依赖其输入参数的模型，标准的替代技术（例如多项式混沌膨胀）不足以获得原始模型响应的准确表示。通过应用有理近似，对于通过有理函数准确描述的模型可以有效地降低近似误差。具体而言，我们的目标是近似复杂值模型。获得替代系数的一种常见方法是最小化模型和替代物之间的基于样本的误差，从最小二乘意义上讲。为了获得原始模型的准确表示并避免过度拟合，样品集的量是扩展中多项式项数的两到三倍。对于需要高多项式程度或在其输入参数方面具有高维度的模型，该数字通常超过负担得起的计算成本。为了克服这个问题，我们将稀疏的贝叶斯学习方法应用于理性近似。通过特定的先前分布结构，在替代模型的系数中诱导稀疏性。分母的多项式系数以及问题的超参数是通过类型-II-Maximim-Maximim类似方法来确定的。我们应用了准牛顿梯度散发算法，以找到最佳的分母系数，并通过应用$ \ mathbb {cr} $ -Colculus来得出所需的梯度。

在这项工作中，我们提出了一个新的高斯进程回归（GPR）方法：物理信息辅助Kriging（PHIK）。在标准数据驱动的Kriging中，感兴趣的未知功能通常被视为高斯过程，其中具有假定的静止协方差，其具有从数据估计的QuandEdmente。在PHIK中，我们从可用随机模型的实现中计算平均值和协方差函数，例如，从管理随机部分微分方程解决方案的实现。这种构造的高斯过程通常是非静止的，并且不承担特定形式的协方差。我们的方法避免了数据驱动的GPR方法中的优化步骤来识别超参数。更重要的是，我们证明了确定性线性操作员形式的物理约束在得到的预测中保证。当在随机模型实现中包含错误时，我们还提供了保留物理约束时的误差估计。为了降低获取随机模型的计算成本，我们提出了一种多级蒙特卡罗估计的平均和协方差函数。此外，我们介绍了一种有源学习算法，指导选择附加观察位置。 PHIK的效率和准确性被证明重建部分已知的修饰的Branin功能，研究三维传热问题，并从稀疏浓度测量学习保守的示踪剂分布。

随机过程提供了数学上优雅的方式模型复杂数据。从理论上讲，它们为可以编码广泛有趣的假设的功能类提供了灵活的先验。但是，实际上，难以通过优化或边缘化来有效推断，这一问题进一步加剧了大数据和高维输入空间。我们提出了一种新颖的变性自动编码器（VAE），称为先前的编码变量自动编码器（$ \ pi $ vae）。 $ \ pi $ vae是有限的交换且Kolmogorov一致的，因此是一个连续的随机过程。我们使用$ \ pi $ vae学习功能类的低维嵌入。我们表明，我们的框架可以准确地学习表达功能类，例如高斯流程，也可以学习函数的属性以启用统计推断（例如log高斯过程的积分）。对于流行的任务，例如空间插值，$ \ pi $ vae在准确性和计算效率方面都达到了最先进的性能。也许最有用的是，我们证明了所学的低维独立分布的潜在空间表示提供了一种优雅，可扩展的方法，可以在概率编程语言（例如Stan）中对随机过程进行贝叶斯推断。

这项正在进行的工作旨在为统计学习提供统一的介绍，从诸如GMM和HMM等经典模型到现代神经网络（如VAE和扩散模型）缓慢地构建。如今，有许多互联网资源可以孤立地解释这一点或新的机器学习算法，但是它们并没有（也不能在如此简短的空间中）将这些算法彼此连接起来，或者与统计模型的经典文献相连现代算法出现了。同样明显缺乏的是一个单一的符号系统，尽管对那些已经熟悉材料的人（如这些帖子的作者）不满意，但对新手的入境造成了重大障碍。同样，我的目的是将各种模型（尽可能）吸收到一个用于推理和学习的框架上，表明（以及为什么）如何以最小的变化将一个模型更改为另一个模型（其中一些是新颖的，另一些是文献中的）。某些背景当然是必要的。我以为读者熟悉基本的多变量计算，概率和统计以及线性代数。这本书的目标当然不是​​完整性，而是从基本知识到过去十年中极强大的新模型的直线路径或多或少。然后，目标是补充而不是替换，诸如Bishop的\ emph {模式识别和机器学习}之类的综合文本，该文本现在已经15岁了。

变异推理（VI）的核心原理是将计算复杂后概率密度计算的统计推断问题转换为可拖动的优化问题。该属性使VI比几种基于采样的技术更快。但是，传统的VI算法无法扩展到大型数据集，并且无法轻易推断出越野数据点，而无需重新运行优化过程。该领域的最新发展，例如随机，黑框和摊销VI，已帮助解决了这些问题。如今，生成的建模任务广泛利用摊销VI来实现其效率和可扩展性，因为它利用参数化函数来学习近似的后验密度参数。在本文中，我们回顾了各种VI技术的数学基础，以构成理解摊销VI的基础。此外，我们还概述了最近解决摊销VI问题的趋势，例如摊销差距，泛化问题，不一致的表示学习和后验崩溃。最后，我们分析了改善VI优化的替代差异度量。