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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Probabilistic Programming in Python using PyMC3

TLDR
This paper is a tutorial-style introduction to PyMC3, a new open source Probabilistic Programming framework written in Python that uses Theano to compute gradients via automatic dierentiation as well as compile probabilistic programs on-the-fly to C for increased speed.
Abstract
Probabilistic Programming allows for automatic Bayesian inference on user-defined probabilistic models. Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling allow inference on increasingly complex models. This class of MCMC, known as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, requires gradient information which is often not readily available. PyMC3 is a new open source Probabilistic Programming framework written in Python that uses Theano to compute gradients via automatic dierentiation as well as compile probabilistic programs on-the-fly to C for increased speed. Contrary to other Probabilistic Programming languages, PyMC3 allows model specification directly in Python code. The lack of a domain specific language allows for great flexibility and direct interaction with the model. This paper is a tutorial-style introduction to this software package.

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Journal ArticleDOI

SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python

TL;DR: SciPy as discussed by the authors is an open source scientific computing library for the Python programming language, which includes functionality spanning clustering, Fourier transforms, integration, interpolation, file I/O, linear algebra, image processing, orthogonal distance regression, minimization algorithms, signal processing, sparse matrix handling, computational geometry, and statistics.
Journal ArticleDOI

SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python.

TL;DR: SciPy as discussed by the authors is an open-source scientific computing library for the Python programming language, which has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in Python, with over 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories and millions of downloads per year.
Posted Content

Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions

Rami Al-Rfou, +111 more
TL;DR: The performance of Theano is compared against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models and recently-introduced functionalities and improvements are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI

Inferring change points in the spread of COVID-19 reveals the effectiveness of interventions.

TL;DR: Modeling and Bayesian inference reveal the time dependence of SARS-CoV-2 interventions on the number of new infections using the example of Germany and the impact of these measures on the disease spread using change point analysis.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

The NumPy Array: A Structure for Efficient Numerical Computation

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show how to improve the performance of NumPy arrays through vectorizing calculations, avoiding copying data in memory, and minimizing operation counts, which is a technique similar to the one described in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation

TL;DR: This effort shows, NumPy performance can be improved through three techniques: vectorizing calculations, avoiding copying data in memory, and minimizing operation counts.
Journal ArticleDOI

Hybrid Monte Carlo

TL;DR: In this article, a hybrid (molecular dynamics/Langevin) algorithm is used to guide a Monte Carlo simulation of lattice field theory, which is especially efficient for quantum chromodynamics which contain fermionic degrees of freedom.
Journal Article

The No-U-turn sampler: adaptively setting path lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

TL;DR: The No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), an extension to HMC that eliminates the need to set a number of steps L, and derives a method for adapting the step size parameter {\epsilon} on the fly based on primal-dual averaging.
Posted Content

Theano: new features and speed improvements

TL;DR: New features and efficiency improvements to Theano are presented, and benchmarks demonstrating Theano's performance relative to Torch7, a recently introduced machine learning library, and to RNNLM, a C++ library targeted at recurrent neural networks.
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