Reviews: A Probabilistic Programming Approach To Probabilistic Data Analysis

This paper takes the default BayesDB example of satellite orbits and shows how to find errors in the observed data given expected behaviour. To achieve this, ths authors construct a new type of generative population model and implement this model as part of the BayesDB/VentureScript environment. Overall I like that this pushes for more complex data analysis tasks in a general probabilistic programming environment. The paper, however, is not an easy read and it is unclear whether the proposed extension are really that general and not tuned towards the orbital example. The authors expect deep knowledge about a number of systems (BayesDB, VentureScript, Crosscat) without clearly showing the difference .