CorePPL Tutorial
In this tutorial, you will learn how to:
Run a simple CorePPL program
Understand the fundamental language constructs of CorePPL
Implement a simple inference algorithm within the framework
Understand the structure to enable the implementation of advanced algorithms and transformations
Note that this tutorial assumes a basic understanding of Bayesian theory and familiarity with other probabilistic programming languages, such as WebPPL, Pyro, or Anglican.
What is CorePPL?​
CorePPL is an intermediate language intended to develop domain-specific probabilistic programming languages. Although it has a concrete syntax and it is possible to write probabilistic models as CorePPL models, the intention is not to be an end-user language. Examples of domain-specific languages that are built using CorePPL are ProbTime, a probabilistic modeling language for real-time systems, and TreePPL, a universal probabilistic programming language for modeling of phylogenetics.
CorePPL is built on top of the Miking framework, a general compiler framework for constructing compilers for domain-specific languages. That is, CorePPL is a light extension of Miking Core (MCore) with a few specific constructs handling probabilistic inference. Besides these new constructs, the syntax and semantics of CorePPL are the same as MCore.
The basic constructs are assume, weight, observe and infer. In the rest of this tutorial, we will discuss these constructs, give an intuition of their semantics, and discuss how to implement new inference algorithms using these constructs.
Running a simple CorePPL program​
Some code