The paper argues against using the Gaussian (squared exponential/RBF) kernel as a default in Gaussian process regression, citing its brittleness. Two key issues are highlighted: the kernel produces unrealistically small conditional variances leading to overconfident predictions, and it causes numerical ill‑conditioning that necessitates ad‑hoc fixes like nugget terms. The authors attribute these problems to the kernel’s analytic, infinitely smooth nature, suggesting that analytic stationary kernels in general should be avoided.
By Toni Karvonen, Chris J. Oates
The monograph explores the relationships between Gaussian processes and reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), two widely used approaches that rely on positive definite kernels. It examines how these frameworks connect and are equivalent across key topics such as regression, interpolation, numerical integration, distributional discrepancies, statistical dependence, and Gaussian process sample path properties. By establishing a unifying perspective based on the equivalence between the Gaussian Hilbert space and the RKHS, the work aims to bridge methods developed independently by the machine learning, statistics, and numerical analysis communities.
By Motonobu Kanagawa, Philipp Hennig, Dino Sejdinovic, Bharath K. Sriperumbudur
arXiv:2610.10080v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Gaussian processes (GPs) are widely used across machine learning, spatial statistics, time-series analysis, optimization, Bayesian statistics, and sc...
By Ameer Qaqish, Didong Li
arXiv:2510. 25599v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Regression tasks, notably in safety-critical domains, require reliable uncertainty quantification, yet the literature remains largely classification-focused.
By Christopher B\"ulte, Yusuf Sale, Gitta Kutyniok, Eyke H\"ullermeier
arXiv:2512. 06143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite a large corpus of recent work on scaling up Gaussian processes, a stubborn trade-off between computational speed, prediction and uncertainty quantification accuracy, and customizability persists.
By Marcus M. Noack, Mark D. Risser, Hengrui Luo, Vardaan Tekriwal, Ronald J. Pandolfi
arXiv:1812.09632v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We propose a data-driven approach to quantify the uncertainty of models constructed by kernel methods. Our approach minimizes the needed distributi...
By Bal\'azs Csan\'ad Cs\'aji, Kriszti\'an Bal\'azs Kis
arXiv:2603. 16481v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-conservative uncertainty bounds are essential for making reliable predictions about latent functions from noisy data, and thus, a key enabler for safe learning-based control.
By Amon Lahr, Anna Scampicchio, Johannes K\"ohler, Melanie N. Zeilinger
arXiv:2510.14878v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We study kernel regression with common rotation-invariant kernels on real datasets including CIFAR-5m, SVHN, and ImageNet. We give a theoreti...
By Dhruva Karkada, Joseph Turnbull, Yuxi Liu, James B. Simon
arXiv:2610.03201v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Gaussian Processes (GPs) are a powerful tool for modelling and quantifying uncertainty in functional relationships. However, they require practitione...
By Callum Lau, Jeremias Knoblauch, Louis Sharrock
arXiv:2602. 23006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulating a Gaussian process requires sampling from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution, which scales cubically with the number of sample locations.
By Arsalan Jawaid, Abdullah Karatas, J\"org Seewig
The paper introduces SCORE, a scalable framework that learns an expressive covariance approximation for high‑dimensional Gaussian targets by combining scoring rule training with spectral‑space modeling. It decomposes the learning task into marginal distribution estimation and structured correlation matrix learning, achieving dense dependencies with linear storage and ≠(d log d) computational cost. The method employs a closed‑form Gaussian kernel score that remains valid for degenerate covariances, provides bounded gradients, and is invariant under unitary transforms, with theoretical guarantees on marginal recovery and correlation projection, and demonstrates improved performance on time‑series forecasting, monocular depth estimation, and spatial weather prediction.
By Christopher B\"ulte, Emil Partow, Astha Gupta, Pascal Esser, Gitta Kutyniok
arXiv:2605. 10285v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a theoretically grounded Gaussian process framework that leverages neural feature maps to construct expressive kernels.
By Anthony Stephenson