Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization with Max-value Entropy Search and its Parallelization

In a standard setting of Bayesian optimization (BO), the objective function evaluation is assumed to be highly expensive. Multifidelity Bayesian optimization (MFBO) accelerates BO by incorporating lower fidelity observations available with a lower sampling cost. We propose a novel information-theoretic approach to MFBO, called multi-fidelity max-value entropy search (MF-MES), that enables us to obtain a more reliable evaluation of the information gain compared with existing information-based methods for MFBO. Further, we also propose a parallelization of MF-MES mainly for the asynchronous setting because queries typically occur asynchronously in MFBO due to a variety of sampling costs. We show that most of computations in our acquisition functions can be derived analytically, except for at most only two dimensional numerical integration that can be performed efficiently by simple approximations. We demonstrate effectiveness of our approach by using benchmark datasets and a real-world application to materials science data.