  Learning in Gaussian Process models occurs through the adaptation of
hyperparameters of the mean and the covariance function. The classical approach
entails maximizing the marginal likelihood yielding fixed point estimates (an
approach called \textit{Type II maximum likelihood} or ML-II). An alternative
learning procedure is to infer the posterior over hyperparameters in a
hierarchical specification of GPs we call \textit{Fully Bayesian Gaussian
Process Regression} (GPR). This work considers two approximation schemes for
the intractable hyperparameter posterior: 1) Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC)
yielding a sampling-based approximation and 2) Variational Inference (VI) where
the posterior over hyperparameters is approximated by a factorized Gaussian
(mean-field) or a full-rank Gaussian accounting for correlations between
hyperparameters. We analyze the predictive performance for fully Bayesian GPR
on a range of benchmark data sets.

Machine Learning;Machine Learning