Constrained Bayesian optimization optimizes a black-box objective function subject to black-box constraints. For simplicity, most existing works assume that multiple constraints are independent. To ask, when and how does dependence between constraints help?, we remove this assumption and implement probability of feasibility with dependence (Dep-PoF) by applying multiple output Gaussian processes (MOGPs) as surrogate models and using expectation propagation to approximate the probabilities. We compare Dep-PoF and the independent version PoF. We propose two new acquisition functions incorporating Dep-PoF and test them on synthetic and practical benchmarks. Our results are largely negative: incorporating dependence between the constraints does not help much. Empirically, incorporating dependence between constraints may be useful if: (i) the solution is on the boundary of the feasible region(s) or (ii) the feasible set is very small. When these conditions are satisfied, the predictive covariance matrix from the MOGP may be poorly approximated by a diagonal matrix and the off-diagonal matrix elements may become important. Dep-PoF may apply to settings where (i) the constraints and their dependence are totally unknown and (ii) experiments are so expensive that any slightly better Bayesian optimization procedure is preferred. But, in most cases, Dep-PoF is indistinguishable from PoF.

Bayesian methods have been rapidly developed due to the important role of explicable causality in practical problems. We develope geometric approaches to Bayesian inference of Pareto models, and give an application to the analysis of sea clutter. For Pareto two-parameter model, we show the non-existence of α-parallel prior in general, hence we adopt Jeffreys prior to deal with the Bayesian inference. Considering geodesic distance as the loss function, an estimation in the sense of minimal mean geodesic distance is obtained. Meanwhile, by involving Al-Bayyati’s loss function we gain a new class of Bayesian estimations. In the simulation, for sea clutter, we adopt Pareto model to acquire various types of parameter estimations and the posterior prediction results. Simulation results show the advantages of the Bayesian estimations proposed and the posterior prediction.

Environmental sound classification (ESC) is a significant problem in signal processing and machine learning. In this paper, a novel unsupervised learning approach is proposed using topological data analysis. Each sound signal is transformed into a point cloud by time-delay embedding. The persistence diagrams are obtained after computing the persistent homology of Vietoris-Rips filtrations. The sound signals are assigned to different classes using kmeans algorithm based on the bottleneck distance matrix of persistence diagrams.