Seth's wish list

[cscherrer]

@sethaxen posted some great ideas on Slack, just capturing them here before they scroll into oblivion :)

I’ll take this as an opportunity to list my personal feature wishlist for Soss:

• [ ] Ability to pass random number generator everywhere where randomness can be (see https://github.com/cscherrer/Soss.jl/issues/98)
• [ ] To be able to do the same thing with particles and rand
• [ ] Have an interface for getting sampler statistics that can be used to diagnose issues, e.g. in ArviZ.jl
• [ ] Progress bar/sampling status. It’s really useful to have some summary stats (like ETA or number of divergences for HMC) to identify early when something is wrong with the model
• [ ] Better support for common distributions (see https://github.com/cscherrer/Soss.jl/issues/99 and the linked issue)
• [ ] Ability/interface for automatically accumulating log-likelihood for WAIC/loo
• [ ] Plotting the model (probably a DAG format), Chad maybe has already worked on this?
• [ ] Zygote support (already exists?)

Some other things to work on:

• [ ] comprehensive set of examples
• [ ] comprehensive test suite (ideally calling examples)
• [ ] documentation
• [ ] decreased time-to-first-model
• [ ] cleaner repo (e.g. move outdated code/experiments elsewhere, make heavy dependencies optional where possible)

[sethaxen]

Thanks! I did some reformatting to add checkboxes for tracking the progress.

[scheidan]

That's a great list! A while ago I was also looking for a way to visualize a DAGs with ASCII symbols. Unfortunately I didn't find a solution for Julia (I've ended up using graphiz) but here are some link to solutions in other languages that may be helpful:

• Graphterm (python)
• Stacked Graph Py (python)
• Stacked Graph (haskell)
• asciidag (python)
• Gaph::Easy (Perl)
• vijual (clojure)
• ascii-graphs (scala)

[cscherrer]

Nice! I think it would be easy enough to get one of the Python implementations of this going. OTOH, I've been looking into ways to get SymPy functionality from SymbolicUtils.jl, and hopefully get rid of the Python dependency altogether. So I think (if it's a Python library) this would need to be in an add-on package.

Not that that's a bad thing! Using it in this way would just add one extra line, to import the package. @scheidan I'd be happy to help you interface to Soss if you wanted to try out something like this.