Journal
MACHINE LEARNING
Volume 100, Issue 1, Pages 5-47Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10994-015-5494-z
Keywords
Probabilistic programming languages; Probabilistic logic programming; Statistical relational learning; Inference in probabilistic languages
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Funding
- Flemish Research Foundation (FWO-Vlaanderen)
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A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution mechanisms that they require and use these to position and survey state-of-the-art probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which have been considered for over 20 years.
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