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Spotlight
Variational Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design
Adam Foster · Martin Jankowiak · Elias Bingham · Paul Horsfall · Yee Whye Teh · Thomas Rainforth · Noah Goodman

Tue Dec 10 04:40 PM -- 04:45 PM (PST) @ West Ballroom C
in Track 4 Session 2 »

Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED) is a principled framework for making efficient use of limited experimental resources. Unfortunately, its applicability is hampered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate estimates of the expected information gain (EIG) of an experiment. To address this, we introduce several classes of fast EIG estimators by building on ideas from amortized variational inference. We show theoretically and empirically that these estimators can provide significant gains in speed and accuracy over previous approaches. We further demonstrate the practicality of our approach on a number of end-to-end experiments.

[ Paper]  [ Poster]  [ Slides] 

Author Information

Adam Foster (University of Oxford)
Martin Jankowiak (Uber AI Labs)
Elias Bingham (Uber AI Labs)
Paul Horsfall (Uber AI Labs)
Yee Whye Teh (University of Oxford, DeepMind)

I am a Professor of Statistical Machine Learning at the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford and a Research Scientist at DeepMind. I am also an Alan Turing Institute Fellow and a European Research Council Consolidator Fellow. I obtained my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto (working with Geoffrey Hinton), and did postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley (with Michael Jordan) and National University of Singapore (as Lee Kuan Yew Postdoctoral Fellow). I was a Lecturer then a Reader at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, and a tutorial fellow at University College Oxford, prior to my current appointment. I am interested in the statistical and computational foundations of intelligence, and works on scalable machine learning, probabilistic models, Bayesian nonparametrics and deep learning. I was programme co-chair of ICML 2017 and AISTATS 2010.

Thomas Rainforth (University of Oxford)
Noah Goodman (Stanford University)

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