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Re:An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming by yt-sdb on Friday October 22, 2021 @06:11PM (#28963404)
Probabilistic programming uses computer science techniques to do automated statistical modeling. For example, imagine I have a coin, and I want to discover if it is biased, i.e. if it lands on heads more often than tails. In a probabilistic programming framework, I can express my model as a simple Bernoulli model, `x ~ Bernoulli(p)`, and then automatically estimate the bias parameter `p` given some data (do "inference").

You can easily do this calculation by hand or in Python, but this does not generalize to more complex real-world scenarios. For complex probabilistic models, we must rely on numerical approximations. MCMC is just one algorithm for doing this approximate inference. Another popular technique is called variational inference [2]. Another commenter mentioned HMC [3], which is just a specific instance of MCMC.

[1] https://mc-stan.org/

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00670

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1901

Re:An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming by BenoitEssiambre on Friday October 22, 2021 @10:28PM (#28965138)
I am not an expert in this but I find the math behind HMC to be out of this world as described in this mindblowing twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/betanalpha/status/1234576972132626445