What are we doing with subsampled MH? - Githubissues

probcomp / Venturecxx

Primary implementation of the Venture probabilistic programming system

http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/venture/

GNU General Public License v3.0

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What are we doing with subsampled MH? #152

Open axch opened 9 years ago

axch commented 9 years ago

Implementing it for Venture (in Python) was a contributed research project. It appears to have been successful, but is now unused. The vestiges:

examples/notebooks/subsampled_mh.ipynb gives a use case
several inference SPs that actually do aspects of it
some additional complexity in scaffold construction to support it The latter is evidence that scaffold construction as envisioned prior to this project may not be flexible enough to support the technique.

Choices:

Do we want to actually test and support this technique? Cost: accepting technical debt now; ongoing software maintenance
Do we want to flush it? Cost: potential unlearning about the needed surface of inferential facilities

axch commented 8 years ago

Quoth @vkmvkmvkmvkm : The paper is still (slowly) being worked on, progressing toward journal submission, so we shouldn't rip it out completely just yet. But definitely don't want to support this implementation in the long term.