Probabilistic programming with densities in SlicStan: efficient, flexible, and deterministic

Sound and Efficient Inference with Probabilistic and Deterministic Dependencies

Reasoning with both probabilistic and deterministic dependencies is important for many real-world problems, and in particular for the emerging field of statistical relational learning. However, probabilistic inference methods like MCMC or belief propagation tend to give poor results when deterministic or near-deterministic dependencies are present, and logical ones like satisfiability testing a...

Efficient Probabilistic Programming Languages

In recent years, declarative programming languages specialized for probabilistic modeling has emerged as distinct class of languages. These languages are predominantly written by researchers in the machine learning field and concentrate on generalized MCMC inference algorithm. Unfortunately, all these languages are too slow for practical adoption. In my talk, I will outline several places where...

Space-Efficient Deterministic Simulation of Probabilistic Automata

Given a description of a probabilistic automaton (one-head probabilistic nite automaton or probabilistic Turing machine) and an input string x of length n, we ask how much space does a deterministic Turing machine need in order to decide the acceptance of the input string by that automaton? The question is interesting even in the case of one-head one-way probabilistic nite automata (PFA). We ca...

Probabilistic Programming Languages: Independent Choices and Deterministic Systems

Pearl [2000, p. 26] attributes to Laplace [1814] the idea of a probabilistic model as a deterministic system with stochastic inputs. Pearl defines causal models in terms of deterministic systems with stochastic inputs. In this paper, I show how deterministic systems with (independent) probabilistic inputs can also be seen as the basis of modern probabilistic programming languages. Probabilistic...

Probabilistic Crowding: Deterministic Crowding with Probabilistic Replacement