WG211/M17Shan

Inference building blocks by Chung-chieh Shan

(I don't have to speak; I'll only be around on July 17 and 18)

How can we make probabilistic inference techniques easier to compose, out of building blocks that comprise an inference language? Our answer to this question is to develop over the last few years an arsenal of automatic transformations whose inputs and outputs are programs in a unifying language of distributions. By expressing inference techniques in terms of these transformations, we can mix and match them with a family of similar probabilistic models and achieve practical performance.