Probabilistic-programming.org Website Review

This website serves as a repository of links and information about probabilistic programming languages, including both academic research spanning theory, algorithms, modeling, and systems, as well as implementations, evaluations, and applications. If you would like to to provide a means to announce new results, software, workshops, etc. The mailing list is fashioned after the popular uai mailing list. Probabilistic graphical models provide a formal lingua franca for modeling and a common target for efficient inference algorithms. Their introduction gave rise to an extensive body of work in machine learning, statistics, robotics, vision, biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. However, many of the most innovative and useful probabilistic models published by the AI, machine learning, and statistics community far outst*ip the representational capacity of graphical models and as*ociated inference techniques. Models are communicated using a mix of natural language, pseudo code, and mathematical formulae and solved using special purpose, one-off inference methods. Rather than precise specifications suitable for automatic inference, graphical models typically serve as coarse, high-level descriptions, eliding critical aspects such as fine-grained independence, abstraction and recursion. PROBABILISTIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES aim to close this representational gap, unifying general purpose programming with probabilistic modeling; literally, users specify a probabilistic model in its entirety (e.g., by writing code that generates a sample from the joint distribution) and inference follows automatically given the specification. These languages provide the full power of modern programming languages for describing complex distributions, and can enable reuse of libraries of models, support interactive modeling and formal verification, and provide a much-needed abstraction barrier to foster generic, efficient inference in universal model clas*es.