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Poster
Collaborative Gaussian Processes for Preference Learning
Neil Houlsby · José Miguel Hernández-Lobato · Ferenc Huszar · Zoubin Ghahramani

Thu Dec 06 02:00 PM -- 12:00 AM (PST) @ Harrah’s Special Events Center 2nd Floor

We present a new model based on Gaussian processes (GPs) for learning pairwise preferences expressed by multiple users. Inference is simplified by using a \emph{preference kernel} for GPs which allows us to combine supervised GP learning of user preferences with unsupervised dimensionality reduction for multi-user systems. The model not only exploits collaborative information from the shared structure in user behavior, but may also incorporate user features if they are available. Approximate inference is implemented using a combination of expectation propagation and variational Bayes. Finally, we present an efficient active learning strategy for querying preferences. The proposed technique performs favorably on real-world data against state-of-the-art multi-user preference learning algorithms.

Author Information

Neil Houlsby (Cambridge)
José Miguel Hernández-Lobato (University of Cambridge)
Ferenc Huszar (University of Cambridge)
Zoubin Ghahramani (Uber and University of Cambridge)

Zoubin Ghahramani is Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the Machine Learning Group. He studied computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, obtained his PhD from MIT in 1995, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. His academic career includes concurrent appointments as one of the founding members of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London, and as a faculty member of CMU's Machine Learning Department for over 10 years. His current research interests include statistical machine learning, Bayesian nonparametrics, scalable inference, probabilistic programming, and building an automatic statistician. He has held a number of leadership roles as programme and general chair of the leading international conferences in machine learning including: AISTATS (2005), ICML (2007, 2011), and NIPS (2013, 2014). In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

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