TensorFlow probability

[Fooourche]

Hi,

Great work on this package and the documentation is amazing.
Are there any plans to integrate tensorflow proability ? https://github.com/tensorflow/probability

Thanks
Fabien

[kieranrcampbell]

The Tensorflow team are deprecating some functions in tensorflow such as the negative binomial distribution and moving them over to tensorflow probability, meaning they will become impossible to use in R shortly - are there any plans to move this forward?

Thanks

[jjallaire]

As part of install_tensorflow() we currently install not just the pip tensorflow package but also the keras and tensorflow-hub packages:

https://github.com/rstudio/tensorflow/blob/master/R/install.R#L39

We could add tensorflow-probability to this, and then export a tfp object the same way we currently export a tf object.

My biggest concern here would be whether this would break when installing older versions of TF (but we could put a filter on for that).

[jjallaire]

It's also important to note that you can use tfp from R right now as follows:

library(tensorflow)
install_tensorflow(extra_packages = c("keras", "tensorflow-hub", "tensorflow-probability"))

tfp <- reticulate::import("tensorflow_probability")

All we'd be doing in the suggestion above is doing this by default (and exporting the tfp object from the tensorflow package).

[kieranrcampbell]

Thanks that's really useful - didn't realize it was an option