Probabilistic Programming Concepts

A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution mechanisms that they require and use these to position state-of-the-art probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which have been developed since more than 20 years

Data Provenance Inference in Logic Programming: Reducing Effort of Instance-driven Debugging

Data provenance allows scientists in different domains validating their models and algorithms to find out anomalies and unexpected behaviors. In previous works, we described on-the-fly interpretation of (Python) scripts to build workflow provenance graph automatically and then infer fine-grained provenance information based on the workflow provenance graph and the availability of data. To broaden the scope of our approach and demonstrate its viability, in this paper we extend it beyond procedural languages, to be used for purely declarative languages such as logic programming under the stable model semantics. For experiments and validation, we use the Answer Set Programming solver oClingo, which makes it possible to formulate and solve stream reasoning problems in a purely declarative fashion. We demonstrate how the benefits of the provenance inference over the explicit provenance still holds in a declarative setting, and we briefly discuss the potential impact for declarative programming, in particular for instance-driven debugging of the model in declarative problem solving

Aggregated fuzzy answer set programming

Fuzzy Answer Set programming (FASP) is an extension of answer set programming (ASP), based on fuzzy logic. It allows to encode continuous optimization problems in the same concise manner as ASP allows to model combinatorial problems. As a result of its inherent continuity, rules in FASP may be satisfied or violated to certain degrees. Rather than insisting that all rules are fully satisfied, we may only require that they are satisfied partially, to the best extent possible. However, most approaches that feature partial rule satisfaction limit themselves to attaching predefined weights to rules, which is not sufficiently flexible for most real-life applications. In this paper, we develop an alternative, based on aggregator functions that specify which (combination of) rules are most important to satisfy. We extend upon previous work by allowing aggregator expressions to define partially ordered preferences, and by the use of a fixpoint semantics