Gen.clj

An open-source stack for generative modeling and probabilistic inference.

Warning Gen.clj, the Clojure implementation of the Gen language, currently only supports a subset of Gen's features. For a complete implementation see Gen.jl. If you would like to get involved with Gen.clj's development please contact us.

Why Gen?

• Gen automates the implementation details of probabilistic inference algorithms
• Gen allows users to flexibly navigate performance trade-offs
• Gen supports custom hybrid inference algorithms
• Users write custom inference algorithms without extending the compiler
• Efficient inference in models with stochastic structure

Getting started

Install

Gen.clj is currently only available as a git dependency. To install Gen.clj, add the following entry to your deps.edn under the :deps key:

io.github.inferenceql/gen.clj {:git/url "https://github.com/inferenceql/gen.clj"
                               :git/sha "3283de82c2b25870b530c22948ac3cdc1b6996d4"}

Learn

The project's interactive documentation was generated from the notebooks in the examples directory using Nextjournal's Clerk. If you'd like to edit or play with the documentation or demos, you'll need to install

• The Clojure command line tool
• Babashka

Next, clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:InferenceQL/gen.clj.git
cd gen.clj

Run this command in the cloned repository:

bb clerk-watch

This will open a browser window to http://localhost:7777 with the contents of the "Introduction to Modeling in Gen.clj" notebook loaded. Any edits you make to examples/intro_to_modeling.clj on your filesystem will update this page, and editing any other file in examples, like examples/introduction.clj, will load that file's namespace into the browser.

For more information on Clerk see the Book of Clerk and the Clerk repository.

Contributors

The Gen team

Gen.jl was created by Marco Cusumano-Towner the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project, which is led by Vikash Mansinghka. Gen.jl has grown and is maintained through the help of a core research and engineering team that includes Alex Lew, Tan Zhi-Xuan, George Matheos, McCoy Becker, Feras Saad and Sam Ritchie, as well as a number of open-source contributors. Gen.jl was adapted to Clojure by Zane Shelby with help from Ulrich Schaechtle. The Gen architecture is described in Marco's PhD thesis.

Citation

If you use Gen in your research, please cite our PLDI paper:

Gen: A General-Purpose Probabilistic Programming System with Programmable Inference. Cusumano-Towner, M. F.; Saad, F. A.; Lew, A.; and Mansinghka, V. K. In Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI ‘19). (pdf) (bibtex)

License

Distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE.