Simulating Gaussian processes on a lattice

March 17, 2022 — July 26, 2022

Gaussian
Hilbert space
kernel tricks
Lévy processes
nonparametric
regression
spatial
stochastic processes
time series

Assumed audience:

ML people

How can I simulate a Gaussian Processes on a lattice with a given covariance?

Figure 1

The general (non-lattice) case is given in historical overview in Liu et al. (2019), but in this notebook we are interested in specialising a little. Following the introduction in Dietrich and Newsam (1993), let’s say we wish to generate a stationary Gaussian process \(Y(x)\) on a points \(\Omega\). \(\Omega=(x_0, x_1,\dots, x_m)\).

Stationary in this context means that the covariance function \(r\) is translation-invariance and depend only on distance, so that it may be given \(r(|x|)\). Without loss of generality, we assume that \(\mathbb E[Y(x)]=0\) and \(\var[Y(x)]=1\).

The problem then reduces to generating a vector \(\vv y=(Y(x_0), Y(x_1), \dots, Y(x_m) )\sim \mathcal{N}(0, R)\) where \(R\) has entries \(R[p,q]=r(|x_p-x_q|).\)

Note that if \(\mathbb \varepsilon\sim\mathcal{N}(0, I)\) is an \(m+1\)-dimensional normal random variable, and \(AA^T=R\), then \(\vv y=\mm A \vv \varepsilon\) has the required distribution.

1 The circulant embedding trick

Figure 2

If we have additional structure, we can work more efficiently.

Suppose further that our points form a grid, \(\Omega=(x_0, x_0+h,\dots, x_0+mh)\); specifically, equally-spaced-points on a line.

We know that \(R\) has a Toeplitz structure. Moreover it is non-negative definite, with \(\vv x^t\mm R \vv x \geq 0\forall \vv x.\) (Why?) 🏗

Wilson et al. (2021) credits the following authors:

Well-known examples of this trend include banded and sparse matrices in the context of one-dimensional Gaussian processes and Gauss–Markov random fields (LoperLineartime2021?), as well as Kronecker and Toeplitz matrices when working with regularly-spaced grids (Dietrich and Newsam 1997; Grace Chan and Wood 1997).

Figure 3

2 References

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———. 1997. Fast and Exact Simulation of Stationary Gaussian Processes Through Circulant Embedding of the Covariance Matrix.” SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing.
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———, et al. 2017b. Circulant Embedding with QMC — Analysis for Elliptic PDE with Lognormal Coefficients.” arXiv:1710.09254 [Math].
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