2025-10-03 –, Coffee room
Language: English
Turing.jl is a probabilistic programming language written entirely in Julia. It makes writing statistical models and performing Bayesian inference on them easy. Turing.jl is used in a wide range of fields from astrophysics to epidemiology, and integrates with the Julia scientific computing ecosystem. It has existed since Julia v0.4, and in this poster we provide an update on its latest new features and current plans for its development.
Turing.jl has grown organically over the 9 years of its existence, and now has an estimated user base of some thousands. We are actively developing it towards a stable v1.0 release with a small team of full-time software engineers and researchers and community contributions. More than a single package, Turing.jl is really an ecosystem of interoperating packages, including an abstract interface for Markov Chain Monte Carlo, many different sampling algorithms, a domain specific language for writing statistical models, and others. It also integrates well with many other packages in the Julia scientific computing ecosystem, which is one of its key strengths compared to other probabilistic programming languages.
Since our last update at JuliaCon 2024, we have made significant changes to
* Handling of submodels, i.e. statistical models as subparts of other statistical models.
* Support for different automatic differentiation packages.
* Several big changes to the interface for inference algorithm developers.
* Better support for variational inference.
Our poster summarises these key new developments, as well as any other significant changes we make between writing this description and presenting the poster. We also describe our roadmap for the future and invite everyone to come talk to us about their use of Turing.jl.
I am a Senior Research Data Scientist at the Alan Turing Institute, working on Turing.jl development. In the past I have also contributed to the Julia ecosystem of tensor network packages.
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Talk to me about: Jane Austen, Pokemon breeding, or classical music! (Or Turing.jl, I guess…)