{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/probabilistic-programming-with-densities-in","title":"Probabilistic Programming with Densities in SlicStan: Efficient, Flexible and Deterministic","arxiv_id":"1811.00890","date":"2018-11-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Maria I. Gorinova","Andrew D. Gordon","Charles Sutton"],"abstract":"Stan is a probabilistic programming language that has been increasingly used\nfor real-world scalable projects. However, to make practical inference\npossible, the language sacrifices some of its usability by adopting a block\nsyntax, which lacks compositionality and flexible user-defined functions.\nMoreover, the semantics of the language has been mainly given in terms of\nintuition about implementation, and has not been formalised.\n  This paper provides a formal treatment of the Stan language, and introduces\nthe probabilistic programming language SlicStan --- a compositional,\nself-optimising version of Stan. Our main contributions are: (1) the\nformalisation of a core subset of Stan through an operational density-based\nsemantics; (2) the design and semantics of the Stan-like language SlicStan,\nwhich facilities better code reuse and abstraction through its compositional\nsyntax, more flexible functions, and information-flow type system; and (3) a\nformal, semantic-preserving procedure for translating SlicStan to Stan.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00890v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.00890v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"probabilistic-programming-with-densities-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/mgorinova/SlicStan","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"probabilistic-programming","task_name":"Probabilistic Programming"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}