Birch is a probabilistic programming language featuring automatic marginalization, automatic conditioning, automatic differentiation, and inference algorithms based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). The Birch language transpiles to C++.
See https://birch-lang.org for a gentle introduction, and https://docs.birch-lang.org for reference documentation.
Birch is open source software. It is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use it except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
Binary packages may be available for your system, see the website. If not, or if you have special requirements, you can install Birch from source. This requires:
The following is optional but recommended for significant performance improvements, and will be linked in automatically if found:
All Birch sources are in the same repository. Clone it:
git clone https://github.com/lawmurray/Birch.git
and change to the Birch
directory:
cd Birch
Then proceed as follows. Note special instructions for Mac in step 2. In
addition, on Mac, you can typically omit sudo
from these commands.
-
Install MemBirch by running, from within the
membirch/
directory:./bootstrap ./configure make sudo make install
-
Install NumBirch by running, from within the
numbirch/
directory:./bootstrap ./configure make sudo make install
-
Install Birch by running, from within the
birch/
directory:./bootstrap ./configure make sudo make install
-
Install the Birch standard library by running, from within the
libraries/Standard/
directory:birch build sudo birch install
This constitutes a basic install. You can inspect the different components for
advanced options, such as disabling assertions to improve performance, or
building the CUDA backend for NumBirch. You may also like to install other
packages in the libraries/
directory. It is not usual to install the
packages in the examples/
directory, although you may like to build and run
these locally for learning purposes.