3.5th Meetup: PyMC3 summer special (talks & hack session)

There's a rare opportunity to gather together a few of the core contributors of the PyMC3 package (https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc3) for a talks & hack session, so let's make a day of it!

We'll hopefully have two core contributors with us: Chris Fonnesbeck (https://github.com/fonnesbeck) (usually in Nashville, USA) and Thomas Wiecki (https://twitter.com/twiecki) (usually in Dusseldorf, Germany), plus other package contributors, and possibly contributors to other packages inc statsmodels. More details TBA.

Schedule:

• 11am - 12pm: two general talks on Bayesian stats in the morning

• Break for lunch at Midday (there's a great cafe downstairs)

• 1pm onwards: hack session where those interested can work on contributions to PyMC3 and/or related Python packages (e.g. PyStan (https://github.com/stan-dev/pystan), MCMCplotlib (https://github.com/mcmcplotlib/mcmcplotlib), statsmodels (https://github.com/statsmodels/statsmodels) etc).

In more detail:

PyMC3 (https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc3) is a leading framework for probabilistic programming entirely based in Python with a theano backend, with support for the NUTS sampler, Variational Inference and lots of useful functionality.

Meetup group members Peadar Coyle, Thomas Wiecki and Jonathan Sedar all recently spoke about PyMC3 and PyStan at the PyData London 2016 Conference (http://pydata.org/london2016/), and it would be great to keep up the momentum.