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An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming

arxiv.org

41–43 of 43 posts

Re: An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly the same thing but try clojure with anglican in nextjournal to see if it fits your needs.

Last time I tried putting a lisp into jupyter as a playground for church, I realized that I was missing all the plotting features to really get anywhere and before I realized it, I had to stop my self from reimplementing church’s standard library. I’ll have a look on google on the names you mentioned :)

In nextjournal you can plot clojure output trivially with plotly or vega-lite. It’s just a matter of adding metadata to your output, like this:

    ^{:nextjournal/viewer :plotly}
    {:data [{:x '(0 10 20 30 40)} 
            {:y '(5 10 15 20 25)}]
     :layout {:autosize false :width 800 :height 400 
              :xaxis1 {:title "year"} 
              :yaxis1 {:title "revenue"}}}
See the result here:

https://nextjournal.com/kommen/plotting-from-clojure

Regarding anglican, here is a link. It’s basically a church port:

https://probprog.github.io/anglican/

Re: An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming

#42
post #28
post #26

Can someone please give an example of how this could be used in practice? On the surface probability seems antithetical to the explicit well-defined determinism of programming.

I wouldn’t classify floating point computation as deterministic

Floating point computation is fully deterministic, every time you do computation on floating point it will give the same results for the same inputs. What you probably meant is that it's not compatible with humans decimal model of floating point math.

Re: An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming

#43
post #40
post #26

Can someone please give an example of how this could be used in practice? On the surface probability seems antithetical to the explicit well-defined determinism of programming.

The best example I've seen is the birthday paradox. How likely is it for 2 people in a N person class to have the same birthday? You can solve this deterministically using math pretty easily. But if you modify the question to ask how likely it is for 3 people, or you add things like February 29th and leap years, or you add the fact that births are more likely during summer months, then it becomes extremely difficult…

It will also be more time consuming to compute, won't it?
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