Contraction rates and projection subspace estimation with Gaussian process priors in high dimension

This work explores the dimension reduction problem for Bayesian nonparametric regression and density estimation. More precisely, we are interested in estimating a functional parameter $f$ over the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, which depends only on a $d_0$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^d$, with $d_0 < d$. It is well-known that rescaled Gaussian process priors over the function space achieve smoothness adaptation and posterior contraction with near minimax-optimal rates. Moreover, hierarchical extensions of this approach, equipped with subspace projection, can also adapt to the intrinsic dimension $d_0$ ([Tok11]). When the ambient dimension $d$ does not vary with $n$, the minimax rate remains of the order $n^{-\beta/(2\beta +d_0)}$, where $\beta$ denotes the smoothness of $f$. However, this is up to multiplicative constants that can become prohibitively large when $d$ grows. The dependences between the contraction rate and the ambient dimension have not been fully explored yet and this work provides a first insight: we let the dimension $d$ grow with $n$ and, by combining the arguments of [Tok11] and [CR24], we derive a growth rate for $d$ that still leads to posterior consistency with minimax rate. The optimality of this growth rate is then discussed. Additionally, we provide a set of assumptions under which consistent estimation of $f$ leads to a correct estimation of the subspace projection, assuming that $d_0$ is known.