Compositional imprecise probability

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liell-Cock, Jack, Staton, Sam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Liell-Cock, Jack
Staton, Sam
author_facet Liell-Cock, Jack
Staton, Sam
contents Imprecise probability is concerned with uncertainty about which probability distributions to use. It has applications in robust statistics and machine learning. We look at programming language models for imprecise probability. Our desiderata are that we would like our model to support all kinds of composition, categorical and monoidal; in other words, guided by dataflow diagrams. Another equivalent perspective is that we would like a model of synthetic probability in the sense of Markov categories. Imprecise probability can be modelled in various ways, with the leading monad-based approach using convex sets of probability distributions. This model is not fully compositional because the monad involved is not commutative, meaning it does not have a proper monoidal structure. In this work, we provide a new fully compositional account. The key idea is to name the non-deterministic choices. To manage the renamings and disjointness of names, we use graded monads. We show that the resulting compositional model is maximal and relate it with the earlier monadic approach, proving that we obtain tighter bounds on the uncertainty.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_09391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compositional imprecise probability
Liell-Cock, Jack
Staton, Sam
Programming Languages
Logic in Computer Science
Category Theory
Probability
Imprecise probability is concerned with uncertainty about which probability distributions to use. It has applications in robust statistics and machine learning. We look at programming language models for imprecise probability. Our desiderata are that we would like our model to support all kinds of composition, categorical and monoidal; in other words, guided by dataflow diagrams. Another equivalent perspective is that we would like a model of synthetic probability in the sense of Markov categories. Imprecise probability can be modelled in various ways, with the leading monad-based approach using convex sets of probability distributions. This model is not fully compositional because the monad involved is not commutative, meaning it does not have a proper monoidal structure. In this work, we provide a new fully compositional account. The key idea is to name the non-deterministic choices. To manage the renamings and disjointness of names, we use graded monads. We show that the resulting compositional model is maximal and relate it with the earlier monadic approach, proving that we obtain tighter bounds on the uncertainty.
title Compositional imprecise probability
topic Programming Languages
Logic in Computer Science
Category Theory
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09391