Introduction to posteriordb
Måns Magnusson is an Associate Professor in Statistics at Uppsala University and affiliated with the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Sweden. His primary research interests are Bayesian inference, probabilistic machine learning, and statistical inference from textual data.
His talk will introduce posteriordb, which is a set of posteriors, i.e. Bayesian statistical models and data sets, reference implementations in probabilistic programming languages, and reference posterior inferences in the form of posterior samples.
Abstract
The general applicability and robustness of posterior inference algorithms is critical to widely used probabilistic programming languages such as Stan, PyMC, Pyro, and Turing.jl. When designing a new inference algorithm, whether it involves Monte Carlo sampling or variational approximation, the fundamental problem is evaluating its accuracy and efficiency across a range of representative target posteriors.
To solve this problem, we propose posteriordb, a database of models and data sets defining target densities along with reference Monte Carlo draws. We further provide a guide to the best practices in using posteriordb for algorithm evaluation and comparison. To provide a wide range of realistic posteriors, posteriordb currently comprises 120 representative models with data, and has been instrumental in developing several inference algorithms.
You can read more in this recent article on posteriordb.