Probabilistic programming in Scala

Odds is a small domain-specific language (DSL) for probabilistic programming, embedded in Scala. Odds provides first-class support for random variables and probabilistic choice, within Scala's powerful type system. Odds programs are actually Scala programs, which means that all of Scala's abstraction and modularity facilities can be used to compose probabilistic computations and to specify deterministic program parts.

1. Odds is written in Scala, which runs on the JVM. So for starters, you'll need an up-to-date JRE/JDK. If you're on a Debian/Ubuntu system, this should do the trick:

    $ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre
   

2. Install the SBT build tool.

3. Clone the GitHub repository:

    $ git clone https://github.com/sstucki/odds.git
   

4. Go into the root directory and compile the source code using SBT:

    $ cd odds
    $ sbt compile
   

5. Run sbt test to run the test suite.

6. Run sbt publish-local to install the Odds library for use in other projects.

Have a look at the various test cases in the core/test/ directory. Many of them are Odds example programs, illustrating how to write an Odds program and perform inference on it.

To build the API docs, run sbt doc. You can find the generated API docs in the core/target/scala-2.10/api/ directory.

Our Scala'13 paper also contains an introduction to Odds and describes the principles it is built on. The source code of Odds has changed quite a bit since Scala'13, but the original source code (on which the paper was based) is available here.

Visit Odds on GitHub.