Re:Probabilistic Programming
by tbenst on Sunday October 23, 2016 @02:55PM
(#12774839)
Yes Stan is awesome! The main difference between something like Stan and "next gen" languages like Anglican and Webppl, is there are basically no restrictions in where you use a distribution. Nested inference, probabilistic recursion, etc are all possible. For certain classes of problems this leads to greatly enhanced expressiveness. On the flip side, Stan is more production ready right now
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A major downside of Stan is its lack of support for discrete priors. This isn't really advertised very well, but is more of a problem than it might sound initially. Its type handling also can get a little frustrating at times. Overall, I highly recommend it but it does have its downsides, and there's some room for alternatives or improvement.