A Verified Compiler for Probability Density Functions
by Manuel Eberl, Johannes Hölzl, and Tobias Nipkow
In: Proceedings of ESOP 2015
DOI:
10.1007/978-3-662-46669-8_4Abstract:
Bhat et al. developed an inductive compiler that computes density functions for probability spaces described by programs in a simple probabilistic functional language. In this work, we implement such a compiler for a modified version of this language within the theorem prover Isabelle and give a formal proof of its soundness w.r.t. the semantics of the source and target language. Together with Isabelle's code generation for inductive predicates, this yields a fully verified, executable density compiler. The proof is done in two steps, using a standard refinement approach: first, an abstract compiler working with abstract functions modelled directly in the theorem prover's logic is defined and proven sound. Then, this compiler is refined to a concrete version that returns a target-language expression.
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BibTeX:
@inproceedings{eberl15esop,
author="Eberl, Manuel and H{\"o}lzl, Johannes and Nipkow, Tobias",
editor="Vitek, Jan",
title="A Verified Compiler for Probability Density Functions",
booktitle="Programming Languages and Systems (ESOP 2015)",
series="Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
volume="9032",
year="2015",
publisher="Springer",
address="Berlin, Heidelberg",
pages="80--104",
doi="10.1007/978-3-662-46669-8_4",
isbn="978-3-662-46669-8"
}
(The final publication is available at link.springer.com)