Iterative Methods for Vecchia-Laplace Approximations for Latent Gaussian Process Models

Pascal Kündig and Fabio Sigrist

Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2025, vol. 120, issue 550, 1267-1280

Abstract: Latent Gaussian process (GP) models are flexible probabilistic nonparametric function models. Vecchia approximations are accurate approximations for GPs to overcome computational bottlenecks for large data, and the Laplace approximation is a fast method with asymptotic convergence guarantees to approximate marginal likelihoods and posterior predictive distributions for non-Gaussian likelihoods. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of combined Vecchia-Laplace approximations grows faster than linearly in the sample size when used in combination with direct solver methods such as the Cholesky decomposition. Computations with Vecchia-Laplace approximations can thus become prohibitively slow precisely when the approximations are usually the most accurate, that is, on large datasets. In this article, we present iterative methods to overcome this drawback. Among other things, we introduce and analyze several preconditioners, derive new convergence results, and propose novel methods for accurately approximating predictive variances. We analyze our proposed methods theoretically and in experiments with simulated and real-world data. In particular, we obtain a speed-up of an order of magnitude compared to Cholesky-based calculations and a 3-fold increase in prediction accuracy in terms of the continuous ranked probability score compared to a state-of-the-art method on a large satellite dataset. All methods are implemented in a free C++ software library with high-level Python and R packages. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2024.2410004

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