doi.org
Debugging probabilistic programs
June 2017 • Chandrakana Nandi, Dan Grossman, Adrian Sampson, Todd Mytkowicz, Kathryn S. McKinley
Many applications compute with estimated and uncertain data. While advances in probabilistic programming help developers build such applications, debugging them remains extremely challenging. New types of errors in probabilistic programs include 1) ignoring dependencies and correlation between random variables and in training data, 2) poorly chosen inference hyper-parameters, and 3) incorrect statistical models. A partial solution to prevent these errors in some languages forbids developers from explicitly invokin…