Generative Datalog with Continuous Distributions

Abstract

Arguing for the need to combine declarative and probabilistic programming, Bárány et al. (TODS 2017) recently introduced a probabilistic extension of Datalog as a "purely declarative probabilistic programming language." We revisit this language and propose a more foundational approach towards defining its semantics. It is based on standard notions from probability theory known as stochastic kernels and Markov processes. This allows us to extend the semantics to continuous probability distributions, thereby settling an open problem posed by Bárány et al. We show that our semantics is fairly robust, allowing both parallel execution and arbitrary chase orders when evaluating a program. We cast our semantics in the framework of infinite probabilistic databases (Grohe and Lindner, ICDT 2020), and we show that the semantics remains meaningful even when the input of a probabilistic Datalog program is an arbitrary probabilistic database.