English

denmarf: a Python package for density estimation using masked autoregressive flow

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2023-05-25 v1

Abstract

Masked autoregressive flow (MAF) is a state-of-the-art non-parametric density estimation technique. It is based on the idea (known as a normalizing flow) that a simple base probability distribution can be mapped into a complicated target distribution that one wishes to approximate, using a sequence of bijective transformations. The denmarf package provides a scikit-learn-like interface in Python for researchers to effortlessly use MAF for density estimation in their applications to evaluate probability densities of the underlying distribution of a set of data and generate new samples from the data, on either a CPU or a GPU, as simple as "from denmarf import DensityEstimate; de = DensityEstimate().fit(X)". The package also implements logistic transformations to facilitate the fitting of bounded distributions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.14379,
  title  = {denmarf: a Python package for density estimation using masked autoregressive flow},
  author = {Rico K. L. Lo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14379},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:43:28.330Z