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International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming

FLOPS 2016: Functional and Logic Programming pp 62–79Cite as

Probabilistic Inference by Program Transformation in Hakaru (System Description)

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9613))

Abstract

We present Hakaru, a new probabilistic programming system that allows composable reuse of distributions, queries, and inference algorithms, all expressed in a single language of measures. The system implements two automatic and semantics-preserving program transformations—disintegration, which calculates conditional distributions, and simplification, which subsumes exact inference by computer algebra. We show how these features work together by describing the ideal workflow of a Hakaru user on two small problems. We highlight our composition of transformations and types in design and implementation.

Thanks to Mike Kucera and Natalie Perna for helping to develop Hakaru.

This research was supported by DARPA grant FA8750-14-2-0007, NSF grant CNS-0723054, Lilly Endowment, Inc. (through its support for the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute), and the Indiana METACyt Initiative. The Indiana METACyt Initiative at IU is also supported in part by Lilly Endowment, Inc.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We implement this universe of types by defining our own Haskell kind using GHC’s -XDataKinds extension. Thus, we call Hakaru and * both “universes” and “kinds”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    Praveen Narayanan, Wren Romano, Chung-chieh Shan & Robert Zinkov

  2. McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Jacques Carette

Authors
  1. Praveen Narayanan
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  2. Jacques Carette
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  3. Wren Romano
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  4. Chung-chieh Shan
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  5. Robert Zinkov
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Praveen Narayanan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Oleg Kiselyov

  2. School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Andy King

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Narayanan, P., Carette, J., Romano, W., Shan, Cc., Zinkov, R. (2016). Probabilistic Inference by Program Transformation in Hakaru (System Description). In: Kiselyov, O., King, A. (eds) Functional and Logic Programming. FLOPS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9613. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29604-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29604-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29603-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29604-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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