Posterior Predictive Sampling in PyMC3 by Luciano Paz

Talk Abstract

PyMC3 is great for inferring parameter values in a model given some observations, but sometimes we also want to generate random samples from the model as predictions given what we already inferred from the observed data. This kind of sampling is called posterior predictive sampling, and it can be very hard. The typical problems that show up are related to shape mismatches in hierarchical models, latent categorical values that aren’t correctly re-sampled or changing the shape of the data between the training and test phases. In this presentation I’ll talk about how posterior predictive sampling is implemented in PyMC3, show some typical situations where it fails, and how to make it work.

Talk

Luciano Paz

I got into Bayesian stats during my PhD in cognitive neuroscience. During my postdoc I got more involved with machine learning, and discovered PyMC3. I became a core contributor of PyMC, learnt a lot in the process and made up my mind to pursue a career outside of academia. I am now a machine learning engineer at Innova SpA in Italy.


This is a PyMCon 2020 talk

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8 Likes

Hi Luciano, thank you for the great talk. Do you happen to have the github link to the notebook(s) you used in this presentation? Thanks

Hi @meraldo, yes it’s GitHub - lucianopaz/pymcon: My presentation for the PyMCON 2020 conference. I’m glad you liked the presentation, but keep in mind that it’s old and used the older version of pymc3. With the newer versions of pymc, things are a bit different now and you can do the things I showed in other ways that don’t involve model factories

1 Like