Complex processes in science and engineering are often formulated as multistage decision-making problems. In this letter, we consider a cascade process, a type of multistage decision-making process. This is a multistage process in which the output of one stage is used as an input for the subsequent stage. When the cost of each stage is expensive, it is difficult to search for the optimal controllable parameters for each stage exhaustively. To address this problem, we formulate the optimization of the cascade process as an extension of the Bayesian optimization framework and propose two types of acquisition functions based on credible intervals and expected improvement. We investigate the theoretical properties of the proposed acquisition functions and demonstrate their effectiveness through numerical experiments. In addition, we consider suspension setting, an extension in which we are allowed to suspend the cascade process at the middle of the multistage decision-making process that often arises in practical problems. We apply the proposed method in a test problem involving a solar cell simulator, the motivation for this study.

In many product development problems, the performance of the product is governed by two types of parameters: design parameters and environmental parameters. While the former is fully controllable, the latter varies depending on the environment in which the product is used. The challenge of such a problem is to find the design parameter that maximizes the probability that the performance of the product will meet the desired requisite level given the variation of the environmental parameter. In this letter, we formulate this practical problem as active learning (AL) problems and propose efficient algorithms with theoretically guaranteed performance. Our basic idea is to use a gaussian process (GP) model as the surrogate model of the product development process and then to formulate our AL problems as Bayesian quadrature optimization problems for probabilistic threshold robustness (PTR) measure. We derive credible intervals for the PTR measure and propose AL algorithms for the optimization and level set estimation of the PTR measure. We clarify the theoretical properties of the proposed algorithms and demonstrate their efficiency in both synthetic and real-world product development problems.

Testing under what conditions a product satisfies the desired properties is a fundamental problem in manufacturing industry. If the condition and the property are respectively regarded as the input and the output of a black-box function, this task can be interpreted as the problem called level set estimation (LSE): the problem of identifying input regions such that the function value is above (or below) a threshold. Although various methods for LSE problems have been developed, many issues remain to be solved for their practical use. As one of such issues, we consider the case where the input conditions cannot be controlled precisely—LSE problems under input uncertainty. We introduce a basic framework for handling input uncertainty in LSE problems and then propose efficient methods with proper theoretical guarantees. The proposed methods and theories can be generally applied to a variety of challenges related to LSE under input uncertainty such as cost-dependent input uncertainties and unknown input uncertainties. We apply the proposed methods to artificial and real data to demonstrate their applicability and effectiveness.

In this letter, we study an active learning problem for maximizing an unknown linear function with high-dimensional binary features. This problem is notoriously complex but arises in many important contexts. When the sampling budget, that is, the number of possible function evaluations, is smaller than the number of dimensions, it tends to be impossible to identify all of the optimal binary features. Therefore, in practice, only a small number of such features are considered, with the majority kept fixed at certain default values, which we call the working set heuristic . The main contribution of this letter is to formally study the working set heuristic and present a suite of theoretically robust algorithms for more efficient use of the sampling budget. Technically, we introduce a novel method for estimating the confidence regions of model parameters that is tailored to active learning with high-dimensional binary features. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of these algorithms and prove that a commonly used working set heuristic can identify optimal binary features with favorable sample complexity. We explore the performance of the proposed approach through numerical simulations and an application to a functional protein design problem.

We study active learning (AL) based on gaussian processes (GPs) for efficiently enumerating all of the local minimum solutions of a black-box function. This problem is challenging because local solutions are characterized by their zero gradient and positive-definite Hessian properties, but those derivatives cannot be directly observed. We propose a new AL method in which the input points are sequentially selected such that the confidence intervals of the GP derivatives are effectively updated for enumerating local minimum solutions. We theoretically analyze the proposed method and demonstrate its usefulness through numerical experiments.