You can find more information here: http://pymc-devs.github.io/pymc3/api/plots.html#pymc3.plots.traceplot, specifically: “priors (iterable of PyMC distributions) – PyMC prior distribution(s) to be plotted alongside posterior. Defaults to None (no prior plots).” Thus, you need to pass e.g. pm.Normal.dist(mu=0, sd=1).