What is probabilistic programming?

What is probabilistic programming?(pl-enthusiast.net)

95 points by tianyicui 11 years ago | 9 comments

platz 11 years ago |

Just a wild guess, but I wonder if there could be a nice connection between probabilistic programming and logic languages like prolog, if only due to the fact that both Bayes graphs and unification both have this "run forwards and backwards" characteristic that is so unlike imperative programming

coolsunglasses 11 years ago | |

>run forwards and backwards

Half-serious: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/tardis-0.3.0.0/docs/Contr...

>probabilistic programming

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/probability

There are a number of articles about writing your own probability monad in Haskell. It's not hard.

dbaupp 11 years ago | | |

> There are a number of articles about writing your own probability monad in Haskell. It's not hard.

Could you provide some links? In a quick search I can only find one article, and that's just about using that package, writing one.

eli_gottlieb 11 years ago | | |

The Probability monad allows for computing exact probabilities, as stated, but that more-or-less misses the point of newer probabilistic programming approaches: avoid the exponential blow-up in complexity of inference due to marginalization by generalizing from evaluation to sampling rather than from evaluation to probability assignment.

jamii 11 years ago | |

There have been various attempts to build logic languages that deal with uncertain information (eg http://www.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/bib/pdf/ir/Fuhr_99a...).

scottdw 11 years ago | | |

Also Church [http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church], a Scheme derivative with probabilistic semantics.

jules 11 years ago | |

Yes, logic programming and probabilistic programming are closely related. See http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/logic-programming.html

CmonDev 11 years ago |

In a way any Python program is probabilistic.

sudowhodoido 11 years ago |

OT of course, but I think that's what our outsourcers did: keep adding monkeys then the probability of completing a programming task slowly converges on 1...