High Dimensional Level Set Estimation with Bayesian Neural Network

Abstract

Level Set Estimation (LSE) is an important problem with applications in various fields such as material design, biotechnology, machine operational testing, etc. Existing techniques suffer from the scalability issue, that is, these methods do not work well with high dimensional inputs. This paper proposes novel methods to solve the high dimensional LSE problems using Bayesian Neural Networks. In particular, we consider two types of LSE problems: (1) explicit LSE problem where the threshold level is a fixed user-specified value, and, (2) implicit LSE problem where the threshold level is defined as a percentage of the (unknown) maximum of the objective function. For each problem, we derive the corresponding theoretic information based acquisition function to sample the data points so as to maximally increase the level set accuracy. Furthermore, we also analyse theoretical time complexity of our proposed acquisition functions, and suggest a practical methodology to efficiently tune the network hyper-parameters to achieve high model accuracy. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our proposed methods can achieve better results compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.