Drop .~ syntax entirely

[yebai]

The .~ syntax allows one to define parameters in a vectorised manner:

x = Vector(undef, 4) 
x .~ Distribution()

#804 introduced extra constraints on the RHS: it has to be univariate distributions. This makes the need for the broadcasting syntax . questionable: it is much less flexible than Julia's broadcasting. So, using the broadcasting .~ might be confusing actually. I think we should further simplify vectorised tilde into

x = Vector(undef, 4) 
x ~ UnivariateDistribution()

This is semantically equivalent to x ~ filldist(UnivariateDistribution(), 4) but with a cleaner syntax. It also provides a clean syntax for supporting (univariate) identically-independently-distributed (IID) distributions discussed previously.

This proposal is also consistent with the Stan syntax for vectorised random variables.

[mhauru]

I would find it semantically confusing to say that a vector is distributed according to a univariate distribution. This also goes strongly against the convention of Julia where you have to use broadcasted . operations to e.g. apply binary operations with a scalar element-wise, or assign elements of a vector as in a = Vector(undef, 4); a .= 0.0. Many other languages allow things like randn(3) + 1.0 but Julia has made the explicit decision to forbid it, and I think it's been a good decision. I don't think the . in .~ complicates our interface much, and it does keep the distinction between arrays/scalars and univariates/multivariates more clear and much more in line with the rest of Julia.

I appreciate that our .~ doesn't implement the full power of usual Julia broadcasting with ., but it does implement a subset of the functionality one would expect from ., and when it works it behaves consistently with Julia's standard . broadcasting. In other cases it errors in a helpful manner. I think this is preferable to having a syntax that goes against the conventions of how broadcasting and mixing scalars and vectors works in Julia.

[penelopeysm]

I'm not opposed to the syntax change, but I'm unsure about how to implement this because at macro time we can't determine whether we need to use filldist or not

@model function f()
    y ~ Normal()
    x = Array{Float64}(undef, 2, 3)
    x ~ Normal()
end

Here we don't want to use filldist for y, but we want to expand the x to filldist(Normal(), 2, 3), and I don't immediately see how we can differentiate between this at macro time. One possible solution would be to always use filldist - i.e. for y we would expand to filldist(Normal(), 1) - but that might be undesirable from a performance point of view.

.~ lets us escape this ambiguity because we assume that anything on the lhs of .~ needs filldist and anything that isn't doesn't need it.

I haven't thought about it super deeply yet though

[penelopeysm]

If we had @parameters struct that might be doable ;D

[yebai]

We could consider contributing a new iid_distribution(dist::UnivariateDistribution, N::Int) to the Distributions.jl package or keep it inside DynamicPPL initially. Then, we can have

y ~ Normal()  # standard univariate RV
x ~ iid_distribution(Normal(), 2, 3)  # similar to `.~` 

This would allow us to replace .~ with iid_distribution and customise condition / fix / etc model operations for iid_distribution.

[torfjelde]

I appreciate that our .~ doesn't implement the full power of usual Julia broadcasting with ., but it does implement a subset of the functionality one would expect from ., and when it works it behaves consistently with Julia's standard . broadcasting.

Not particularly relevant to the full discussion, but to add to your commeont here @mhauru: it's also worth noting that some things that would make sense if we followed broadcasting semantics in Julia fully doesn't quite make sense in a @model.

An example is

    x = Matrix(undef, 2, 1)
    x .~ reshape(fill(Normal(), 2), 1, 2)

This would technically work in Turing, but results in sampling both of the components of x twice and accumulating that into logp. Simiarly during logp-evaluation, you'd double-count x[1, 1] and x[2, 1] in your logp.