Church refers to both a family of
LISP
Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation.
Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...
-like ''
probabilistic programming languages'' for specifying arbitrary
probabilistic programs, as well as a set of
algorithms
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for per ...
for performing probabilistic
inference
Inferences are steps in logical reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinct ...
in the
generative model
In statistical classification, two main approaches are called the generative approach and the discriminative approach. These compute classifiers by different approaches, differing in the degree of statistical modelling. Terminology is inconsiste ...
s those programs define. Church was originally developed at
MIT, primarily in the computational cognitive science group, run by
Joshua Tenenbaum.
[
] Several different inference algorithms and concrete languages are in existence, including Bher, MIT-Church, Cosh, Venture, and Anglican.
References
Nondeterministic programming languages
Probabilistic software
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