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title: Gaussian Process
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## Gaussian Process

In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a particular kind of statistical model where observations occur in a continuous domain, e.g. time or space. In a Gaussian process, every point in some continuous input space is associated with a normally distributed random variable. Moreover, every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution, i.e. every finite linear combination of them is normally distributed. The distribution of a Gaussian process is the joint distribution of all those (infinitely many) random variables, and as such, it is a distribution over functions with a continuous domain, e.g. time or space.

Viewed as a machine-learning algorithm, a Gaussian process uses lazy learning and a measure of the similarity between points (the kernel function) to predict the value for an unseen point from training data. The prediction is not just an estimate for that point, but also has uncertainty information—it is a one-dimensional Gaussian distribution (which is the marginal distribution at that point).

#### More Information:

- [Gaussian Processes for Dummies](http://katbailey.github.io/post/gaussian-processes-for-dummies/)