English

Stochastic Probabilistic Programs

Machine Learning 2020-01-23 v3 Machine Learning Programming Languages

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a stochastic probabilistic program and present a reference implementation of a probabilistic programming facility supporting specification of stochastic probabilistic programs and inference in them. Stochastic probabilistic programs allow straightforward specification and efficient inference in models with nuisance parameters, noise, and nondeterminism. We give several examples of stochastic probabilistic programs, and compare the programs with corresponding deterministic probabilistic programs in terms of model specification and inference. We conclude with discussion of open research topics and related work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.02656,
  title  = {Stochastic Probabilistic Programs},
  author = {David Tolpin and Tomer Dobkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.02656},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

7 pages main body, 4 pages appendix