In plain words: Instead of hand-coding an inference routine for every model and algorithm, this approach rewrites the model's code with reusable building blocks to generate the routine automatically. On real-world problems, the generated code ran about as fast and accurately as other probabilistic programming systems.
Abstract
Probabilistic inference procedures are usually coded painstakingly from scratch, for each target model and each inference algorithm. We reduce this effort by generating inference procedures from models automatically. We make this code generation modular by decomposing inference algorithms into reusable program-to-program transformations. These transformations perform exact inference as well as generate probabilistic programs that compute expectations, densities, and MCMC samples. The resulting inference procedures are about as accurate and fast as other probabilistic programming systems on real-world problems.
Robert Zinkov, Chung-chieh Shan
arXiv:1603.01882 · stat.ML, cs.AI, stat.CO, stat.ME · submitted Mar 6, 2016 · updated Jul 12, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages, 5 figures. To appear in Proceedings of the 33rd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2017)