PyMC3 does not sample from my custom prior

Questions
1

Hi, I wanna design a special prior for my data. However, it seems PyMC3 does not sample from my prior.
I am giving a simple example below.

class MyPrior(pm.Continuous):
    
    def __init__(self, mu, sd, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.mu = mu
        self.sd = sd
        self.dist = pm.Normal.dist(mu=mu, sd=sd)

    def random(self, point=None, size=None):
        tmp = self.dist.random(point=point, size=size)
        print(tmp)
        return tmp

    def log_normal(self, mu, sd, val):
        const = -0.5 * (np.log(2*np.pi) + 2*np.log(sd))
        exp = -0.5 * (val-mu)**2 / sd**2
        return const + exp
    
    def logp(self, value):
        print('## logp')
#         return self.log_normal(self.mu, self.sd, value)
        return self.dist.logp(value)


with pm.Model() as model:
#     mu = pm.Normal('mu', mu=0, sd=10)
    mu = MyPrior('mu', mu=0, sd=10, testval=0)
    sd = pm.HalfNormal('sd', sd=10)
    
    obs = pm.Normal('obs', mu=mu, sd=sd, observed=np.random.randn(100))
    
    trace = pm.sample(500, tune=1000, cores=2)

When I run this code, it only prints '## logp' 3 times at the begining, and never prints tmp, which means the model only runs my logp for test values and never samples from my prior.
Do I impl the prior correctly? Thanks for the help in advance.

2

I dont think you need to worry about the number of times logp() being called - for what it’s worth, inference in pymc3 does not repeatedly called the logp method, as the logp is represented as a tensor, and it’s the tensor that will be repeatedly evaluated. In another word, logp only called in the model set up, but not during the actually inference. See https://docs.pymc.io/developer_guide.html#logp-and-dlogp for more details.

if you want to log the logp, you can add below into your model:

with ...
    mu_logp = pm.Deterministic('mu_logp', mu.distribution.logp(mu))
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