stripe / rainier

Bayesian inference in Scala.
https://rainier.fit
Apache License 2.0
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Find a better name for `real` in `Continuous` #475

Closed avibryant closed 4 years ago

avibryant commented 4 years ago

As of 0.3.0rc2, the way to create a Real random variable from any Continuous distribution is with the real method.

As I work on multivariate distributions, this seems short-sighted, since a MVNormal distribution's random variable would be a Vec[Real], and real is not an awesome name for a method that returns that.

Options might include:

... something else?

avibryant commented 4 years ago

This obviously needs to be resolved before the final 0.3.0 release since it would be a breaking change after that.

avibryant commented 4 years ago

One argument against using rv is that generator is also producing a (different kind of) random variable from the same distribution.

An argument against using param is that the Real you get is not necessarily (and in fact almost never) the same as the raw, untransformed parameter that HMC will be working with.

avibryant commented 4 years ago

I'm currently really liking @snoble's suggest of latent