Practical Probabilistic Programming

Chapter 12. Solving other inference tasks

This chapter covers

• How to query the joint probability of multiple variables
• How to compute the most likely values of all variables in your model
• How to compute the probability of your observed evidence

So far, you’ve looked at ways of answering questions such as “What’s the probability that the printer power switch is off, given that it’s not printing correctly?” or “What’s the probability that I’ll win the Oscar, given my skill and the movie’s quality?” All of these questions can be summarized as answering the query of computing the posterior probability distribution over a single variable, given the evidence. A variety of other inference tasks can be performed using probabilistic programming. ...