Church swMATH ID: 8946 Software Authors: Goodman N., Mansinghka V.K., Roy D., Bonawitz K., Tenenbaum J.B. Description: Church: A language for generative models. We introduce Church, a universal language for describing stochastic generative processes. Church is based on the Lisp model of lambda calculus, containing a pure Lisp as its deterministic subset. The semantics of Church is defined in terms of evaluation histories and conditional distributions on such histories. Church also includes a novel language construct, the stochastic memoizer, which enables simple description of many complex non-parametric models. We illustrate language features through several examples, including: a generalized Bayes net in which parameters cluster over trials, infinite PCFGs, planning by inference, and various non-parametric clustering models. Finally, we show how to implement query on any Church program, exactly and approximately, using Monte Carlo techniques. Homepage: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1206/1206.3255.pdf Related Software: BLOG; IBAL; ProbLog; Figaro; Haskell; FACTORIE; Venture; Stan; BUGS; Infer.NET; PRISM; WinBUGS; NUTS; Hakaru; PITA; EasyCheck; Theano; Isabelle/HOL; Blaise; PFLP Cited in: 53 Publications all top 5 Cited by 134 Authors 6 De Raedt, Luc 4 Dal Lago, Ugo 4 Staton, Sam 3 Borgström, Johannes 3 Gordon, Andrew D. 3 Kimmig, Angelika 2 Belle, Vaishak 2 de Laet, Tinne 2 Freer, Cameron E. 2 Greenberg, Michael D. 2 Kiselyov, Oleg 2 Lloyd, John Wylie 2 Margetson, James 2 Ng, Kee Siong 2 Nitti, Davide 2 Roy, Daniel M. 2 Shan, Chung-chieh 2 Uther, William T. B. 2 Van Gael, Jurgen 2 Yang, Hongseok 1 Abdallah, Samer A. 1 Aizatulin, Mihhail 1 Angelopoulos, Nicos 1 Bach, Stephen H. 1 Bartocci, Ezio 1 Blei, David M. 1 Bonchi, Filippo 1 Bonilla, Edwin V. 1 Bornn, Luke 1 Breuvart, Flavien 1 Broda, Krysia B. 1 Broecheler, Matthias 1 Bruynooghe, Maurice 1 Carette, Jacques 1 Chen, Yutian 1 Cho, Kenta 1 Christiansen, Jan 1 Claret, Guillaume 1 Cobb, Andrew 1 Cohen, William W. 1 Crubillé, Raphaëlle 1 Culpepper, Ryan 1 Cussens, James 1 Dash, Swaraj 1 Davis, Ernest 1 de Freitas, Nando 1 Dezfouli, Amir 1 Diard, Julien 1 Dickens, Luke 1 Dylus, Sandra 1 Eskelin, Mareija 1 Fang, Jing 1 Fischer, Sebastian 1 Gagliardi Cozman, Fabio 1 Gallois-Wong, Diane 1 Gelman, Andrew 1 Getoor, Lise 1 Goodman, Noah D. 1 Graepel, Thore 1 Grellois, Charles 1 Gretz, Friedrich 1 Gutmann, Bernd 1 Hanrahan, Pat 1 Herrou, Agathe 1 Heunen, Chris 1 Hirata, Michikazu 1 Hoffmann, Jan-Philipp 1 Hommersom, Arjen 1 Hoshino, Naohiko 1 Hriţcu, Cătălin 1 Huang, Bert 1 Hutter, Marcus 1 Jacobs, Bart 1 Jansen, Nils 1 Kaminski, Benjamin Lucien 1 Kammar, Ohad 1 Kane, Jonathan M. 1 Katoen, Joost-Pieter 1 Kirste, Thomas 1 Kovács, Laura Ildikó 1 Krauth, Karl 1 Kucukelbir, Alp 1 Lampropoulos, Leonidas 1 Lee, Jiho 1 Lucas, Peter J. F. 1 Lüdtke, Stefan 1 Marcus, Gary F. 1 Mauá, Denis Deratani 1 Mazaitis, Kathryn Rivard 1 McIver, Annabelle K. 1 Meert, Wannes 1 Michels, Steffen 1 Milch, Brian 1 Mildenhall, Ben 1 Minamide, Yasuhiko 1 Morrisett, Greg 1 Narayanan, Praveen 1 Nori, Aditya Vithal 1 Olmedo, Federico 1 Passerini, Andrea ...and 34 more Authors all top 5 Cited in 16 Serials 6 International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 4 Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) 3 Artificial Intelligence 3 Machine Learning 2 The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 2 Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 1 Biological Cybernetics 1 Theoretical Computer Science 1 Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 1 ACM Transactions on Graphics 1 MSCS. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 1 Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 1 Journal of Applied Logic 1 Logical Methods in Computer Science 1 Mathematical Geosciences 1 Annales Henri Lebesgue all top 5 Cited in 9 Fields 47 Computer science (68-XX) 10 Statistics (62-XX) 9 Mathematical logic and foundations (03-XX) 8 Probability theory and stochastic processes (60-XX) 3 Category theory; homological algebra (18-XX) 2 Operations research, mathematical programming (90-XX) 1 Numerical analysis (65-XX) 1 Geophysics (86-XX) 1 Biology and other natural sciences (92-XX) Citations by Year