Convergence Certificate for Stochastic Derivative-Free Trust-Region Methods based on Gaussian Processes (2010.01120v1)

Abstract: In many machine learning applications, one wants to learn the unknown objective and constraint functions of an optimization problem from available data and then apply some technique to attain a local optimizer of the learned model. This work considers Gaussian processes as global surrogate models and utilizes them in conjunction with derivative-free trust-region methods. It is well known that derivative-free trust-region methods converge globally---provided the surrogate model is probabilistically fully linear. We prove that \glspl{gp} are indeed probabilistically fully linear, thus resulting in fast (compared to linear or quadratic local surrogate models) and global convergence. We draw upon the optimization of a chemical reactor to demonstrate the efficiency of \gls{gp}-based trust-region methods.