PyMC4 on Autograd?

Development
1

Super hypothetical question… what if we used Autograd as the computational backend for PyMC4?

Happy for the idea to be shot down. One (and possibly only) advantage I could think of off the top of my head is that we’d never have to be swept away by a package going out of fad; Autograd is architecturally simple though a teeny bit of an overhead to maintain.

Anyways, just thought I’d ask, and maybe this’ll also revive some interest in the PyMC4 backend discussion. It feels like there’s a time limit before PyMC3 has to sunset, and I’d hate for this wonderful package to go away.

2

FWIW, I’m working on wrapping CuPy with autograd, so I’m thinking it might help with taking advantage of the GPU too!

3

I have never used autograd, but I heard they are a bit slow?

4

It is, but I think it’s mostly because autograd currently only auto diffs numpy code, which makes the matrix ops slower than it could be. (Mostly speaking from experience here; I built a keras-like thing using autograd when I was still in grad school, while I was still learning deep learning basics.)