Multi-objective Bayesian Optimization using Pareto-frontier Entropy

Abstract

We propose Pareto-frontier entropy search (PFES) for multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MBO). Unlike the existing entropy search for MBO which considers the entropy of the input space, we define the entropy of Pareto-frontier in the output space. By using a sampled Pareto-frontier from the current model, PFES provides a simple formula for directly evaluating the entropy. Besides the usual MBO setting, in which all the objectives are simultaneously observed, we also consider the "decoupled" setting, in which the objective functions can be observed separately. PFES can easily derive an acquisition function for the decoupled setting through the entropy of the marginal density for each output variable. For the both settings, by conditioning on the sampled Pareto-frontier, dependence among different objectives arises in the entropy evaluation. PFES can incorporate this dependency into the acquisition function, while the existing information-based MBO employs an independent Gaussian approximation. Our numerical experiments show effectiveness of PFES through synthetic functions and real-world datasets from materials science.