Max-value entropy search (MES) is one of the state-of-the-art approaches in Bayesian optimization (BO). In this paper, we propose a novel variant of MES for constrained problems, called Constrained MES via Information lower BOund (CMES-IBO), that is based on a Monte Carlo (MC) estimator of a lower bound of a mutual information (MI). Unlike existing studies, our MI is defined so that uncertainty with respect to feasibility can be incorporated. We derive a lower bound of the MI that guarantees non-negativity, while a constrained counterpart of conventional MES can be negative. We further provide theoretical analysis that assures the low-variability of our estimator which has never been investigated for any existing information-theoretic BO. Moreover, using the conditional MI, we extend CMES-IBO to the parallel setting while maintaining the desirable properties. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CMES-IBO by several benchmark functions and real-world problems.

This paper studies an entropy-based multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MBO). Existing entropy-based MBO methods need complicated approximations to evaluate entropy or employ over-simplification that ignores trade-off among objectives. We propose a novel entropy-based MBO called Pareto-frontier entropy search (PFES), which is based on the information gain of Pareto-frontier. We show that our entropy evaluation can be reduced to a closed form whose computation is quite simple while capturing the trade-off relation in Pareto-frontier. We further propose an extension for the “decoupled” setting, in which each objective function can be observed separately, and show that the PFES-based approach derives a natural extension of the original acquisition function which can also be evaluated simply. Our numerical experiments show effectiveness of PFES through several benchmark datasets, and real-word datasets from materials science.