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Bayesian Optimization on Networks

Published: October 31, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.27643v1

By: Wenwen Li, Daniel Sanz-Alonso, Ruiyi Yang

Potential Business Impact:

Finds best spots on maps for tough problems.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

This paper studies optimization on networks modeled as metric graphs. Motivated by applications where the objective function is expensive to evaluate or only available as a black box, we develop Bayesian optimization algorithms that sequentially update a Gaussian process surrogate model of the objective to guide the acquisition of query points. To ensure that the surrogates are tailored to the network's geometry, we adopt Whittle-Mat\'ern Gaussian process prior models defined via stochastic partial differential equations on metric graphs. In addition to establishing regret bounds for optimizing sufficiently smooth objective functions, we analyze the practical case in which the smoothness of the objective is unknown and the Whittle-Mat\'ern prior is represented using finite elements. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms for optimizing benchmark objective functions on a synthetic metric graph and for Bayesian inversion via maximum a posteriori estimation on a telecommunication network.

Page Count
36 pages

Category
Statistics:
Machine Learning (Stat)