Daniel_Burfoot comments on Church: a language for probabilistic modeling - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (22)
Naively, separation of model from inference algorithm seems like a terrible idea. People use problem-specific approximation algorithms because if they don't exploit specific features of the model, inference will be completely intractable. Often this consideration is so important that people will use obviously sub-optimal models, if those models support fast inference.
Yes, deriving mechanisms that take complex models and turn them into something tractable is mostly an open problem.