Theano, TensorFlow and the Future of PyMC – PyMC Developers – Medium

Since the Theano team announced that it would cease development and maintenance of Theano within a year, we, the PyMC developers, have been actively discussing what to do about this. We are very excited to announce that the new version of PyMC will use TensorFlow Probability (TFP) as its backend. TensorFlow already has a very broad user base and with TFP gained a powerful new library with elegant support for probability distributions and transformations (called bijections, see the TFP paper for a full description), as well as a layer for constructing probabilistic models, called Edward2. It is clear that TFP's focus is to provide a strong foundation upon which flexible statistical models for inference and prediction can be constructed from the ground up. Its focus is not, however, to provide a high-level API which makes construction and fitting of common classes of models easy for applied users.