Gibbs Sampling in Open-Universe Stochastic Languages
  Languages for open-universe probabilistic models (OUPMs) can represent
situations with an unknown number of objects and iden- tity uncertainty. While
such cases arise in a wide range of important real-world appli- cations,
existing general purpose inference methods for OUPMs are far less efficient
than those available for more restricted lan- guages and model classes. This
paper goes some way to remedying this deficit by in- troducing, and proving
correct, a generaliza- tion of Gibbs sampling to partial worlds with possibly
varying model structure. Our ap- proach draws on and extends previous generic
OUPM inference methods, as well as aux- iliary variable samplers for
nonparametric mixture models. It has been implemented for BLOG, a well-known
OUPM language. Combined with compile-time optimizations, the resulting
algorithm yields very substan- tial speedups over existing methods on sev- eral
test cases, and substantially improves the practicality of OUPM languages
generally.
