Abstract

We present a new variational inference algorithm for Gaussian process regression with non-conjugate likelihood functions, with application to a wide array of problems including binary and multi-class classification, and ordinal regression. Our method constructs a concave lower bound that is optimized using an efficient fixed-point updating algorithm. We show that the new algorithm has highly competitive computational complexity, matching that of alternative approximate inference methods. We also prove that the use of concave variational bounds provides stable and guaranteed convergence – a property not available to other approaches. We show empirically for both binary and multi-class classification that our new algorithm converges much faster than existing variational methods, and without any degradation in performance.