Fast Bayesian intensity estimation for the permanental process

The Cox process is a stochastic process which generalises the Poisson process by letting the underlying intensity function itself be a stochastic process. In this paper we present a fast Bayesian inference scheme for the permanental process, a Cox process under which the square root of the intensity is a Gaussian process. In particular we exploit connections with reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, to derive efficient approximate Bayesian inference algorithms based on the Laplace approximation to the predictive distribu-tion and marginal likelihood. We obtain a simple algorithm which we apply to toy and real-world problems, obtaining orders of magnitude speed improvements over previous work.