A comprehensive & self-contained introduction to Gaussian processes which provide a principled practical probabilistic approach to learning in kernel machines Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a principled practical probabilistic approach to learning in kernel machines GPs have received increased attention in the machine-learning community over the past decade & this book provides a long-needed systematic & unified treatment of theoretical & practical aspects of GPs in machine learning The treatment is comprehensive & self-contained targeted at researchers & students in machine learning & applied statistics The book deals with the supervised-learning problem for both regression & classification &
Includes:: detailed algorithms A wide variety of covariance (kernel) functions are presented & their properties discussed Model selection is discussed both from a Bayesian & a classical perspective Many connections to other well-known techniques from machine learning & statistics are discussed including support-vector machines neural networks splines regularization networks relevance vector machines & others Theoretical issues including learning curves & the PAC-Bayesian framework are treated & several approximation methods for learning with large datasets are discussed The book contains illustrative examples & exercises & code & datasets are available on the Web Appendixes provide mathematical background & a discussion of Gaussian Markov processes