Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
discourse.edwardlib.org
Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
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Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#2"Edward is a Python library for probabilistic modeling, inference, and criticism. It is a testbed for fast experimentation and research with probabilistic models, ranging from classical hierarchical models on small data sets to complex deep probabilistic models on large data sets. Edward fuses three fields: Bayesian statistics and machine learning, deep learning, and probabilistic programming."
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#3Super interesting given that the main Edward competitor, PyMC3, was built on Theano which is discontinuing as of a few days ago.
Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow.
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#4Super interesting given that the main Edward competitor, PyMC3, was built on Theano which is discontinuing as of a few days ago. Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow.
“Everything being subsumed by TensorFlow” doesn’t seem to me like a particularly worrisome outcome. The status quo is “everything being a Python library,” and people generally seem to view that as positive. The PyData movement brought another level of interoperability to the ecosystem, so you can combine elements from Pandas, SciPy, sklearn, etc with good runtime performance and low cognitive load. Bringing everything into TensorFlow abstractions makes more optimizations possible (especially on heterogeneous architectures), and perhaps even more importantly, makes it easy to run end-to-end gradient descent on compositions of parts from across the ecosystem.
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#5Super interesting given that the main Edward competitor, PyMC3, was built on Theano which is discontinuing as of a few days ago. Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow.
"Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow."
Why?
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#6Super interesting given that the main Edward competitor, PyMC3, was built on Theano which is discontinuing as of a few days ago. Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow.
"Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow." Why?
Probably because there is an unfortunate trend when Google enters a product category: Everything around it dies.
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#7Super interesting given that the main Edward competitor, PyMC3, was built on Theano which is discontinuing as of a few days ago. Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow.
"Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow." Why?
I don't have anything against Tensorflow, but I've learned over the years that it's good to have competition in numerical libraries and software so there's replication of results. Try your analysis using one library, and corroborate it using another one. When a field is dependent on one major piece of software, it's more susceptible to bugs--a programming bug becomes a misguided line of research for a whole field.
Edward has been a promising addition to the PPL landscape. I actually preferred using it with Theano when I used it but that was a year ago, and it seems to have been developing rapidly. I have mixed feelings about this announcement, although to be honest I don't totally even really understand all the implications of it. In some ways I'm not sure how much Edward incrementally adds above and beyond TF; it has occupied a niche between something like TF and Stan or PyMC which is fine enough but I've sometimes wondered if it was sustainable in the long run. I have appreciated it being around, though, and have hoped it would continue to develop.
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow." Why?
I don't have anything against Tensorflow, but I've learned over the years that it's good to have competition in numerical libraries and software so there's replication of results. Try your analysis using one library, and corroborate it using another one. When a field is dependent on one major piece of software, it's more susceptible to bugs--a programming bug becomes a misguided line of research for a whole field. Ed…
Who's the numpy competitor? Are we suffuring due to lack of one?
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#9Super interesting given that the main Edward competitor, PyMC3, was built on Theano which is discontinuing as of a few days ago. Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow.
It's built on top of Tensorflow, so it doesn't seem like a terrible idea.
Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have anything against Tensorflow, but I've learned over the years that it's good to have competition in numerical libraries and software so there's replication of results. Try your analysis using one library, and corroborate it using another one. When a field is dependent on one major piece of software, it's more susceptible to bugs--a programming bug becomes a misguided line of research for a whole field. Ed…
Who's the numpy competitor? Are we suffuring due to lack of one?
PyTorch, Theano (rip), TensorFlow itself, Numba/Blaze?