Efficient Level-Crossing Probability Calculation for Gaussian Process Modeled Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient method to compute level-crossing probabilities in Gaussian process models by adaptively subdividing data regions, significantly reducing computational costs for high-resolution scientific data visualization.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical subdivision approach that uses upper bounds of level-crossing probabilities to accelerate calculations in GPR models.

Findings

Accurate probability estimation with low computational cost.

Effective hierarchical subdivision reduces unnecessary calculations.

Method scales well with high-resolution data.

Abstract

Almost all scientific data have uncertainties originating from different sources. Gaussian process regression (GPR) models are a natural way to model data with Gaussian-distributed uncertainties. GPR also has the benefit of reducing I/O bandwidth and storage requirements for large scientific simulations. However, the reconstruction from the GPR models suffers from high computation complexity. To make the situation worse, classic approaches for visualizing the data uncertainties, like probabilistic marching cubes, are also computationally very expensive, especially for data of high resolutions. In this paper, we accelerate the level-crossing probability calculation efficiency on GPR models by subdividing the data spatially into a hierarchical data structure and only reconstructing values adaptively in the regions that have a non-zero probability. For each region, leveraging the known GPR kernel and the saved data observations, we propose a novel approach to efficiently calculate an upper bound for the level-crossing probability inside the region and use this upper bound to make the subdivision and reconstruction decisions. We demonstrate that our value occurrence probability estimation is accurate with a low computation cost by experiments that calculate the level-crossing probability fields on different datasets.