Missing prediction

[Sepideh-Adamiat]

I made a custom node and want to check the forwarded message out of that by using it in a model. This is the implementation:

struct MyNode end
@node MyNode Stochastic [out, in1, in2]

# rule specification
@rule MyNode(:out, Marginalisation) (m_in1::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily, m_in2::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily) = begin
    min1, vin1 = mean_var(m_in1)
    min2, vin2 = mean_var(m_in2)
    return NormalMeanVariance(min1 + min2, vin1 + vin2)
end

@rule MyNode(:in1, Marginalisation) (m_out::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily, m_in2::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily) = begin
    min2, vin2 = mean_var(m_in2)
    mout, vout = mean_var(m_out)
    return NormalMeanVariance(mout - min2, vout + vin2) 
end

@rule MyNode(:in2, Marginalisation) (m_out::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily, m_in1::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily) = begin
    min1, vin1 = mean_var(m_in1)
    mout, vout = mean_var(m_out)
    return NormalMeanVariance(mout - min1, vout + vin1) 
end

@rule MyNode(:in1, Marginalisation) (q_out::Any, m_in2::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily) = begin
    min2, vin2 = mean_var(m_in2)
    return NormalMeanVariance(mean(q_out) - min2, vin2)
end

@rule MyNode(:in2, Marginalisation) (q_out::Any, m_in1::UnivariateNormalDistributionsFamily) = begin
    min1, vin1 = mean_var(m_in1)
    return NormalMeanVariance(mean(q_out) - min1, vin1)
end

@model function My_model(y)
    A ~ NormalMeanVariance(2.0,1.0)
    B ~ NormalMeanVariance(1.0,1.0)
    y ~ MyNode(A,B)
end
result = infer(
    model = My_model(),
    predictvars  = (y = KeepLast(), ),
)

But when I predict the y using:

result.predictions[:y]

it gives "missing". As an alternative, I also tried

result = infer(
    model = My_model(),
    data  = (y = missing , ),
)

The result is the same.

[bvdmitri]

I will repeat my message from Slack for better observability, we may fix it in the future, here is a workaround

julia> result = infer(
           model = My_model(),
           data = (y = UnfactorizedData(missing), ),
       )
Inference results:
  Posteriors       | available for (A, B)
  Predictions      | available for (y)


julia> result.predictions
Dict{Symbol, NormalMeanVariance{Float64}} with 1 entry:
  :y => NormalMeanVariance{Float64}(μ=3.0, v=2.0)

This is an unfortunate detail of the implementation. Basically due to the fact that y is treated as data entry automatic constraints makes structured factorization for your model, which means that your written BP rules are never called. Instead RxInfer attempts to compute joint marginal over A and B , but since data is missing there is no information to compute it, so the inference engine happily returns you missing as a result.

Not great at all, but `UnfactorizedData was an attempt to override the default behavior and force BP rules. Its referenced here and was a way to fix broken example where predictions were completely off due to similar issue