Practical Probabilistic Programming

Chapter 4. Probabilistic models and probabilistic programs

This chapter covers

• The definition of a probabilistic model
• How probabilistic models are used to answer queries
• The ingredients of a probabilistic model, including variables, dependencies, functional forms, and numbers
• How a probabilistic program represents the ingredients of a probabilistic model

Part 1 of this book introduced probabilistic programming. You learned that a probabilistic reasoning system uses a probabilistic model to answer queries, given evidence, and that probabilistic programming uses a program to represent the probabilistic model. This part of the book goes deeper into representing probabilistic models. You’ll learn a variety of programming techniques for writing ...