Conditioning

Conditioning is supported through the use of the condition, observe and factor operators. Only a brief summary of these methods is given here. For a more detailed introduction, see the Probabilistic Models of Cognition chapter on conditioning.

Note that because these operators interact with inference, they can only be used during inference. Attempting to use them outside of inference will produce an error.

condition(bool)

Conditions the marginal distribution on an arbitrary proposition. Here, bool is the value obtained by evaluating the proposition.

Example usage:

var model = function() {
  var a = flip();
  var b = flip();
  condition(a || b)
  return a;
};

observe(distribution, value[, sampleOpts])

Conceptually, this is shorthand for drawing a value from distribution and then conditioning on the value drawn being equal to value, which could be written as:

var x = sample(distribution);
condition(x === value);
return x;

However, in many cases expressing the condition in this way would be exceedingly inefficient, so observe uses a more efficient implementation internally.

In particular, it’s essential to use observe to condition on the value drawn from a continuous distribution.

When value is undefined no conditioning takes place, and observe simply returns a sample from distribution. In this case, sampleOpts can be used to specify any options that should be used when sampling. Valid options are exactly those that can be given as the second argument to sample.

Example usage:

var model = function() {
  var mu = gaussian(0, 1);
  observe(Gaussian({mu: mu, sigma: 1}), 5);
  return mu;
};

factor(score)

Adds score to the log probability of the current execution.