  The vast quantity of information brought by big data as well as the evolving
computer hardware encourages success stories in the machine learning community.
In the meanwhile, it poses challenges for the Gaussian process (GP) regression,
a well-known non-parametric and interpretable Bayesian model, which suffers
from cubic complexity to data size. To improve the scalability while retaining
desirable prediction quality, a variety of scalable GPs have been presented.
But they have not yet been comprehensively reviewed and analyzed in order to be
well understood by both academia and industry. The review of scalable GPs in
the GP community is timely and important due to the explosion of data size. To
this end, this paper is devoted to the review on state-of-the-art scalable GPs
involving two main categories: global approximations which distillate the
entire data and local approximations which divide the data for subspace
learning. Particularly, for global approximations, we mainly focus on sparse
approximations comprising prior approximations which modify the prior but
perform exact inference, posterior approximations which retain exact prior but
perform approximate inference, and structured sparse approximations which
exploit specific structures in kernel matrix; for local approximations, we
highlight the mixture/product of experts that conducts model averaging from
multiple local experts to boost predictions. To present a complete review,
recent advances for improving the scalability and capability of scalable GPs
are reviewed. Finally, the extensions and open issues regarding the
implementation of scalable GPs in various scenarios are reviewed and discussed
to inspire novel ideas for future research avenues.
