I'm trying to use GPflow for a multidimensional regression. But I'm confused by the shapes of the mean and variance. For example: A 2-dimensional input space X of shape (20,20) is supposed to be predicted. My training samples are of shape (8,2) which means 8 training samples overall for the two dimensions. The y-values are of shape (8,1) which of course means one value of the ground truth per combination of the 2 input dimensions. If I now use model.predict_y(X) I would expect to receive a mean of shape (20,20) but obtain a shape of (20,1). Same goes for the variance. I think that this problem comes from the shape of the y-values but I have have no idea how to fix it.
bound = 3
num = 20
X = np.random.uniform(-bound, bound, (num,num))
print(X_sample.shape) # (8,2)
print(Y_sample.shape) # (8,1)
k = gpflow.kernels.RBF(input_dim=2)
m = gpflow.models.GPR(X_sample, Y_sample, kern=k)
m.likelihood.variance = sigma_n
m.compile()
gpflow.train.ScipyOptimizer().minimize(m)
mean, var = m.predict_y(X)
print(mean.shape) # (20, 1)
print(var.shape) # (20, 1)
It sounds like you may be confused between the shape of a grid of input positions and the shape of the numpy arrays: if you want to predict on a 20 x 20 grid in two dimensions, you have 400 points in total, each with 2 values. So X (the one that you pass to m.predict_y()) should have shape (400, 2). (Note that the second dimension needs to have the same shape as X_sample!)
To construct this array of shape (400,2) you can use np.meshgrid (e.g., see What is the purpose of meshgrid in Python / NumPy?).
m.predict_y(X) only predicts the marginal variance at each test point, so the returned mean and var both have shape (400,1) (same length as X). You can of course reshape them to the 20 x 20 values on your grid.
(It is also possible to compute the full covariance, for the latent f this is implemented as m.predict_f_full_cov, which for X of shape (400,2) would return a 400x400 matrix. This is relevant if you want consistent samples from the GP, but I suspect that goes well beyond this question.)