A supermartingale approach to Gaussian process based sequential design of experiments

Gaussian process (GP) models have become a well-established frameworkfor the adaptive design of costly experiments, and notably of computerexperiments. GP-based sequential designs have been found practicallyefficient for various objectives, such as global optimization(estimating the global maximum or maximizer(s) of a function),reliability analysis (estimating a probability of failure) or theestimation of level sets and excursion sets. In this paper, we studythe consistency of an important class of sequential designs, known asstepwise uncertainty reduction (SUR) strategies. Our approach relieson the key observation that the sequence of residual uncertaintymeasures, in SUR strategies, is generally a supermartingale withrespect to the filtration generated by the observations. Thisobservation enables us to establish generic consistency results for abroad class of SUR strategies. The consistency of several popularsequential design strategies is then obtained by means of this generalresult. Notably, we establish the consistency of two SUR strategiesproposed by Bect, Ginsbourger, Li, Picheny and Vazquez (Stat. Comp.,2012)---to the best of our knowledge, these are the first proofs ofconsistency for GP-based sequential design algorithms dedicated to theestimation of excursion sets and their measure. We also establish anew, more general proof of consistency for the expected improvementalgorithm for global optimization which, unlike previous results inthe literature, applies to any GP with continuous sample paths.