[PyMCon Web Series 07] Automatic Probability with PyMC (June 28, 2023) (Ricardo Vieira)

Welcome to the 7th event of the PyMCon Web Series! As part of this series, most events will have both an asynchronous component and a live Q&A.

Speaker: Ricardo Vieira, a PyMC Core Developer and Data Scientist at PyMC Labs.
Event type: Recorded Talk with Live Q&A
Async Talk and Notebook: June 9th, 2023
Live Q&A: June 28th, 2023 (subscribe here for email updates)
Register for the event: Meetup event (to get the Zoom link)
Website: PyMCon Events · PyMCon Web Series

:loudspeaker: NOTE: This session is exclusively for Q&A. We kindly request that you watch the recording before joining the event. Plus, The event will be recorded. Subscribe to the PyMC YouTube channel for notifications.

Sponsor

We thank our sponsors for supporting PyMC and the PyMCon Web Series. If you would like to sponsor us, contact us for more information.

As the place where the future of AI gathers, ODSC works to bring together the global data science community to encourage the exchange of innovative ideas and the growth of open source software." or as well you can use the short sentences like “The future of AI gathers here”, “Build AI better”.

The upcoming events include ODSC Europe (June 14-15, in-person (London) and virtual), Generative AI Summit (July 20, virtual), ODSC APAC (Aug 22-23, virtual), ODSC West (Oct 31-Nov 3, in-person (San Francisco) and virtual).

Abstract of the Talk:

Many people have heard of (or at least used) automatic differentiation, a set of routines that allow programs to compute partial derivatives from numerical functions. This innovation allowed a large class of users to benefit from gradient-based algorithms without having to understand or manually implement their own gradient functions.

PyMC grabbed this idea and applied it to a completely novel context: automatic probability. With it, we can automatically derive and evaluate probability expressions from user-specified random functions. Similar to automatic differentiation, this allows users to create rich generative models and exploit probability-based algorithms (e.g., NUTS) without having to manually implement their own probability functions.

In this talk, we present this new foundation of PyMC and how it can (and is already) used to construct specialized classes of models, from arbitrary variable transformations to mixture distributions, censoring processes, and highly structured timeseries.

The goal is to understand what makes PyMC a true probabilistic programming language and how you can exploit it!

Content

Slides:

Notebook:

Async Talk:

About the Speaker:

Ricardo Vieira
Ricardo Vieira is a PyMC developer and data scientist at PyMC Labs. He spent several years teaching himself statistics and computer science at the expense of his official degrees in psychology and neuroscience.

Ricardo’s Interview:

Connect with Todd:
      Website: https://ricardov94.github.io/posts/
      GitHub: https://github.com/ricardoV94

Connecting with PyMC

      PyMCon Web Series: https://pymcon.com/
      LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pymc/
      Twitter: https://twitter.com/pymc_devs
      YouTube: PyMC Developers - YouTube
      Meetup: PyMC Online Meetup (New York, NY) | Meetup
      Mastodon: PyMC developers (@pymc@bayes.club) - Bayes Club
      GitHub: GitHub - pymc-devs/pymc: Bayesian Modeling in Python

4 Likes

Don’t miss out on this exclusive interview with Ricardo Vieira, PyMC Core Developer and Data Scientist at PyMC Labs, as he shares his fascinating journey exploring computational statistics and Bayesian models of cognition.
:cinema:Watch now:

2 Likes

The much awaited async talk by Ricardo Vieira is finally online!

Explore essential aspects of PyMC like automatic differentiation, automatic probability, specialized model construction, and more. Watch the video, check out the slides and notebooks, and get ready for the upcoming live Q&A session with Ricardo.

Video Link:

Slides: Automatic Probability - Google Slides
Notebook: Automatic probability.ipynb · GitHub

:point_right: Register now for the Q&A session on June 28th at 14:00 UTC: [PyMCon Web Series] Automatic Probability with PyMC - Q&A, Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 10:00 AM | Meetup

3 Likes

Great and super cool talk. Excited to see more transforms, pymc-experimental features, and logp support down the line. What functionality is Ricardo looking forward to the most?

2 Likes

In case you missed the live session, the recording is now accessible on YouTube.
Watch the recording now:

1 Like