Density

The density transform (density) finds the density of a probability distribution at a particular point. This transform is a specialized form of the disintegrate transform that also computes the expectation of the probabilistic distribution as part of its work.

Usage

Your Hakaru program must be a probability distribution (type measure(x)) in order to use the density transform. Most Hakaru programs that end with a return statement do not meet this requirement because they return values instead of functions on values.

You can use the density transform in the command line by calling:

density hakaru_program.hk

This transformation will produce a new Hakaru program containing an anonymous function representing the density function for that model.

Example

The normal distribution is a commonly used distribution in probabilistic modeling. A simple Hakaru program modelling the simplest normal distribution is:

normal(0,1)

Assuming that this program is named norm.hk, we can calculate the density function for this distribution by running:

density norm.hk

Note: The output for density will be printed in the console. You can easily save this program to a file by redirecting the output to a file by calling density model1.hk > model2.hk. For this example, we will call our new program norm_density.hk.

When you open the new Hakaru program, norm_density.hk, you will find an anonymous Hakaru function. You can then assign values to the function’s arguments to test the probabilistic density at a specific point in the model.

fn x0 real: 
 (exp((negate(((x0 + 0) ^ 2)) / 2)) / 1 / sqrt((2 * pi)) / 1)

For example, if you wanted to test the density at 0.2, you could alter norm_density.hk to:

normalDensity = fn x0 real: 
 (exp((negate(((x0 + 0) ^ 2)) / 2)) / 1 / sqrt((2 * pi)) / 1)

return normalDensity(0.2)

You could then use the hakaru command to have Hakaru compute the density:

$ hakaru norm_density.hk | head -n 1
0.3910426939754559

Note: If the argument head -n 1 is omitted, the hakaru command will print out the resulting density value indefinitely.