stan VS jax

Alternatives: stan and edward

remove.packages(c("StanHeaders", "rstan")) install.packages("rstan", repos = c("https://mc-stan.org/r-packages/", getOption("repos")))

My approach to problems like this is to write down the proposed model mathematically first, in extreme detail. I find hierarchical form to be the easiest way to break it down piece by piece. Once I have the maths then I turn it into a Stan model. Last step is to use the Stan output to answer the research questions.

Here is a good breakdown of recommendations from Andrew Gelman.

For instance my first choice in these cases is always a Bayesian inference tool like Stan. In my experience as someone who’s more of a programmer than mathematician/statistician, Bayesian tools like this make it much easier to not accidentally fool yourself with assumptions, and they can be pretty good at catching statistical mistakes.

I tend to be most impressed by tools and libraries. The stuff that has most impressed me in my time in ML is stuff like pytorch and Stan, tools that allow expression of a wide variety of statistical (and ML, DL models, if you believe there's a distinction) models and inference from those models. These are the things that have had the largest effect in my own work, not in the sense of just using these tools, but learning from their design and emulating what makes them successful.

oh its certainly used in practice. you should look into frameworks like Stan[1] and pyro[2]. i think bayesian models are seen as more explainable so they will be used in industries that value that sort of thing

[1] https://mc-stan.org/

If you like high-performance array programming a la "numpy with JIT" I suggest looking at JAX. It's very suitable for general numeric computing (not just ML) and a very mature ecosystem.

https://github.com/jax-ml/jax

Nope, changing graph shape requires recompilation: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/17191

I found a GitHub issue that seemed similar (missing ptxas) and saw a suggestion to install nvidia-cuda-toolkit. Alright: but that exploded the container size from 6.5 GB to 12.13 GB … unacceptable 😤 (Incidentally, this is too large for Cloud Shell to build on its limited persistent disk.)

The dual numbers exist just as surely as the real numbers and have been used well over 100 years

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number

Pytorch has had them for many years.

https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.autograd.for...

JAX implements them and uses them exactly as stated in this thread.

https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/10157#discussionco...

As you so eloquently stated, "you shouldn't be proclaiming things you don't actually know on a public forum," and doubly so when your claimed "corrections" are so demonstrably and totally incorrect.

On your last point, as long as you jit the topmost level, it doesn't matter whether or not you have inner jitted functions. The end result should be the same.

Source: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/5199#discussioncom...

The design of MLX is inspired by frameworks like NumPy, PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire.

I'm still not totally sure what the issue is. Jax uses program transformations to compile programs to run on a variety of hardware, for example, using XLA for TPUs. It can also run cuda ops for Nvidia gpus without issue: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

There is also support for custom cpp and cuda ops if that's what is needed: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Custom_Operation_for_GP...

I haven't worked with float4, but can imagine that new numerical types would require some special handling. But I assume that's the case for any ml environment.

But really you probably mean fixed point 4bit integer types? Looks like that has had at least some work done in Jax: https://github.com/google/jax/issues/8566

>

Are they even comparing apples to apples to claim that they see these improvements over NumPy?

> While the code complexity and length are roughly the same, the MatX version shows a 2100x over the Numpy version, and over 4x faster than the CuPy version on the same GPU.

NumPy doesn't use GPU by default unless you use something like Jax [1] to compile NumPy code to run on GPUs. I think more honest comparison will mainly compare MatX running on same CPU like NumPy as focus the GPU comparison against CuPy.

[1] https://github.com/google/jax

Actually that never changed. The README has always had an example of differentiating through native Python control flow:

https://github.com/google/jax/commit/948a8db0adf233f333f3e5f...

The constraints on control flow expressions come from jax.jit (because Python control flow can't be staged out) and jax.vmap (because we can't take multiple branches of Python control flow, which we might need to do for different batch elements). But autodiff of Python-native control flow works fine!