This paper describes an ecient method for learning the parameters of a Gaussian process (GP). The parameters are learned from multiple tasks which are assumed to have been drawn independently from the same GP prior. An ecient algorithm is obtained by extending the informative vector machine (IVM) algorithm to handle the multi-task learning case. The multi-task IVM (MTIVM) saves computation by greedily selecting the most informative examples from the separate tasks. The MT-IVM is also shown to be more ecient than random sub-sampling on an articial data-set and more eective than the traditional IVM in a speaker dependent phoneme recognition task.
Neil D. Lawrence, John C. Platt