andreas comments on Church: a language for probabilistic modeling - Less Wrong

18 [deleted] 22 October 2010 11:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (22)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: andreas 24 October 2010 02:10:33AM 1 point [-]

They don't work without continuous parameters. If you have a probabilistic program that includes both discrete and continuous parameters, you can use gradient methods to generate MH proposals for your continuous parameters. I don't think there are any publications that discuss this yet.

Comment author: jsalvatier 24 October 2010 03:08:29AM 0 points [-]

Oh, ok that makes perfect sense. Breaking inference problems into sub problems and using different methods on the sub problems seems like a common technique.