Parallel Approximations for High-Dimensional Multivariate Normal Probability Computation in Confidence Region Detection Applications

Addressing the statistical challenge of computing the multivariate normal (MVN) probability in high dimensions holds significant potential for enhancing various applications. For example, the critical task of detecting confidence regions where a process probability surpasses a specific threshold is essential in diverse applications, such as pinpointing tumor locations in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan images, determining hydraulic parameters in groundwater flow issues, and forecasting regional wind power to optimize wind turbine placement, among numerous others. One common way to compute high-dimensional MVN probabilities is the Separation-of-Variables (SOV) algorithm. This algorithm is known for its high computational complexity of O(n
³
) and space complexity of O(n
²
), mainly due to a Cholesky factorization operation for an n×n covariance matrix, where n represents the dimensionality of the MVN problem. This work proposes a high-performance computing framework that allows scaling the SOV algorithm and, subsequently, the confidence region detection algorithm. The framework leverages parallel linear algebra algorithms with a task-based programming model to achieve performance scalability in computing process probabilities, especially on large-scale systems. In addition, we enhance our implementation by incorporating Tile Low-Rank (TLR) approximation techniques to reduce algorithmic complexity without compromising the necessary accuracy. To evaluate the performance and accuracy of our framework, we conduct assessments using simulated data and a wind speed dataset. Our proposed implementation effectively handles high-dimensional multivariate normal (MVN) probability computations on shared and distributed-memory systems using finite precision arithmetics and TLR approximation computation. Performance results show a significant speedup of up to 20X in solving the MVN problem using TLR approximation compared to the reference dense solution without sacrificing the application’s accuracy. The qualitative results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate how we maintain high accuracy in detecting confidence regions even when relying on TLR approximation to perform the underlying linear algebra operations.