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Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

discourse.edwardlib.org

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21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#21

Post by marmaduke »

wodenokoto wrote: post #8
hulistinist wrote: post #7

Earlier 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?

Numpy was the fusion of competiting numerical libraries for Python, and now it is quite stable.

I think point still applies for new developing software: multiple implementations can corroborate each other or help identify bugs.

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#22

Post by dragandj »

dasmoth wrote: post #12
wodenokoto wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's the numpy competitor? Are we suffuring due to lack of one?

Who's the numpy competitor? R? Eigen? Neanderthal? HMatrix? (Yes, none of these are exactly 1:1 equivalent with numpy, but there absolutely are options. And from my point of view, having some options which aren’t tied to Python is healthy).

Thanks for mentioning Neanderthal! http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org http://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal

It aims to have more features, and more speed than numpy, with Clojure, on the JVM + Nvidia + AMD + Intel.

Also relevant here is Bayadera, Clojure/GPU Bayesian modeling lib for the JVM: http://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#23

Post by nextos »

cshenton wrote: post #13

I've had the pleasure of working with Edward for the last couple of months, and it's been the first PPL I've felt comfortable building a stable production codebase on top of. It strikes a great balance between feeling like you're programming with probability distributions, and providing ways of diving under the hood to improve performance when you need to (like tweaking the underlying tf optimizer, or being able to i…

What kind of production stuff are you developing?

I'm a probabilistic programming enthusiast, and I had the impression it's still an open research field.

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#24

Post by thejosh »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #15
michaelmior wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that people often forget to include context like this in announcements. Thanks for sharing!

The announcement is on edwardlib.org (the URL shared on HN). Wouldn't that be an obvious connection? A project making an announcement about itself on its own website, seems natural to me.

Yes, but it's always nice when a project gives a tldr on their blog about what they are.

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#25

Post by foepys »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #15
michaelmior wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that people often forget to include context like this in announcements. Thanks for sharing!

The announcement is on edwardlib.org (the URL shared on HN). Wouldn't that be an obvious connection? A project making an announcement about itself on its own website, seems natural to me.

The announcement should at least include a link to an explanation on the main project page. Due to only being posted on discourse, there is no direct link to go to the main project page, only by manually editing the URL or googling for Edward. Even the logo in the top-left corner only leads to the discourse overview page.

Edit: Just editing the URL leads to an HTTPS error because the certificate is only valid for *.github.io; you need to use HTTP.

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#26

Post by splike »

cshenton wrote: post #13

I've had the pleasure of working with Edward for the last couple of months, and it's been the first PPL I've felt comfortable building a stable production codebase on top of. It strikes a great balance between feeling like you're programming with probability distributions, and providing ways of diving under the hood to improve performance when you need to (like tweaking the underlying tf optimizer, or being able to i…

I've only seen Edward for the first time today, and it looks quite nice.

Could you (or anyone else) comment on why would you choose Edward over something PyMC3? How does it compare?

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#27

Post by joelthelion »

wodenokoto wrote: post #8
hulistinist wrote: post #7

Earlier 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?

Don't forget that numpy was initially a MATLAB competitor, and that we are all a lot better off for it :)

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#28

Post by cshenton »

nextos wrote: post #23
cshenton wrote: post #13

I've had the pleasure of working with Edward for the last couple of months, and it's been the first PPL I've felt comfortable building a stable production codebase on top of. It strikes a great balance between feeling like you're programming with probability distributions, and providing ways of diving under the hood to improve performance when you need to (like tweaking the underlying tf optimizer, or being able to i…

What kind of production stuff are you developing? I'm a probabilistic programming enthusiast, and I had the impression it's still an open research field.

Time Series forecasting as a service. It's an area where careful treatment of error distributions matters a lot. There's a link in my HN profile, though the page won't be up for another week.

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#29

Post by cshenton »

splike wrote: post #26
cshenton wrote: post #13

I've had the pleasure of working with Edward for the last couple of months, and it's been the first PPL I've felt comfortable building a stable production codebase on top of. It strikes a great balance between feeling like you're programming with probability distributions, and providing ways of diving under the hood to improve performance when you need to (like tweaking the underlying tf optimizer, or being able to i…

I've only seen Edward for the first time today, and it looks quite nice. Could you (or anyone else) comment on why would you choose Edward over something PyMC3? How does it compare?

I had the same question when I was first choosing libraries for my current project!

So I put together this comparison of PyMC3, Edward, and Stan. It's jut doing bayesian inference on the location and scale of data sampled from a normal distribution. Super simple, but highlights the differences between the libraries.

https://github.com/cshenton/normal-comparison

Having worked with Edward, the LOC difference is deceptive. Edward has really solid abstract base classes, so developing on it is much more expressive for larger projects. I unequivocally recommend using Edward.

Re: Edward is officially moving into TensorFlow

#30

Post by dasmoth »

dragandj wrote: post #22
dasmoth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's the numpy competitor? R? Eigen? Neanderthal? HMatrix? (Yes, none of these are exactly 1:1 equivalent with numpy, but there absolutely are options. And from my point of view, having some options which aren’t tied to Python is healthy).

Thanks for mentioning Neanderthal! http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org http://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal It aims to have more features, and more speed than numpy, with Clojure, on the JVM + Nvidia + AMD + Intel. Also relevant here is Bayadera, Clojure/GPU Bayesian modeling lib for the JVM: http://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera

Thanks, I'd somehow missed Bayadera. Something else to take a good look at!
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