Making sense of Probabilistic Programming with Figaro and Pfennig — SlamData tech talk 2016-09-08

Making sense of Probabilistic Programming with Figaro and Pfennig
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SlamData tech talk 2016-09-08

Building Interest
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- Noticed Probabilistic Graphical Models on Coursera
  - https://www.coursera.org/learn/probabilistic-graphical-models
- Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series) by Daphne Koller  (Author), Nir Friedman  (Author)
  - http://pgm.stanford.edu/
- Practical Probabilistic Programming by Avi Pfeffer
  - https://manning.com/books/practical-probabilistic-programming
- Re-thinking Prolog by Oleg Kiselyov and Yukiyoshi Kameyama
  - Leverages Hansei, a probabilistic programming language embedded in OCaml
- Hansei
  - http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/Hansei.html

A few quick quotes
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- "What we've been witnessing lately is the intersection of probability and computer science"
  - Vikash K. Mansinghka — An Overview of Probabilistic Programming
- "Probabilistic programming combines two great research areas that go great together—functional programming and machine learning (specifically, Bayesian inference)"
  - Noel Welsh — Probabilistic Programming in Scala
- "Let's not forget that one of the real powers of programming languages is they let us think thoughts we were unable to think before we had access to the linguistic technology."
  - Vikash K. Mansinghka — An Overview of Probabilistic Programming

Dive into slides
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- Functional Probabilistic Programming CUFP 2013 — Avi Pfeffer
  - http://cufp.org/2013/slides/pfeffer.pdf
- Practical Probabilistic Programming with Figaro — Avi Pfeffer
  - http://www.slideshare.net/SessionsEvents/avi-pfeffer-principal-scientist-charles-river-analytics

Other things to show
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- Scikit-learn — chosing the right estimator
  - http://scikit-learn.org/stable/tutorial/machine_learning_map/index.html
- BayesDB
  - http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/

Questions and thoughts
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- All kinds of crazy low level models for ML out there. Is this a way to unify?
- Any ties to stochastic queries with confidence intervals? For data that's missing?
- Any opportunities for these ideas in what we're building?
- Does figaro have any sort of computation distribution?
- Quickly in a sea of so much to explore :-)
- Other ideas, thoughts, paths of exploration?

Talks
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- Avi Pfeffer - Practical Probabilistic Programming with Figaro - MLconf SEA 2016
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO4ZXLQjba8
  - http://www.slideshare.net/SessionsEvents/avi-pfeffer-principal-scientist-charles-river-analytics
- CUFP 2013: Avi Pfeffer: Functional Probabilistic Programming
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U67guma2H6s
  - http://cufp.org/2013/slides/pfeffer.pdf
- Probabilistic Programming: Why, What, How, When? — Salesforce Engineering
  - http://www.slideshare.net/salesforceeng/probabalistic-programming-why-what-how-when
    - A bit high level. Few interesting slides on Church lang.
- "An Overview of Probabilistic Programming" by Vikash K. Mansinghka
  - what we've been witnessing lately is the intersection of probability and computer science
  - BayesDB with BQL, a SQL-like query language for Bayesian data analysis
  - ~ "but let's not forget that one of the real powers of programming languages is they let us think thoughts we're unable to think before we had access to the linguistic technology and so the the approach were trying to take an approach to computing project design languages that expand our range of problems that are sensible to pose and I think that's a really important activity because we're at just the beginning of serious integration of computation probability and it would be a shame to kind of narrow vision before it got started and will need your help for that as well so thank you"
- "BayesDB: Query the Probable Implications of Data" by Richard Tibbetts
  - Haven't checked out yet but would like to
- Probabilistic Programming: What It Is and How It Works - Noel Welsh
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Ykk_CqKTY&index=3&list=PL_5uJkfWNxdkQd7FbN1whrTOsJPMgHgLg
  - http://noelwelsh.com/assets/downloads/typelevel-summit-philly-2016.pdf

Blog Posts
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- Probabilistic Programming in Scala — Noel Welsh
  - http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2016/04/21/probabilistic-programming.html