Sampling does not start or is very slow on mixture model tutorial

[ikibkilam]

I am new to PYMC3. While learning, I did a Mixture Model tutorial, outlined in the book "Probabilistic Programming & Bayesian Methods for Hackers". I believe I am doing exactly what was outlined in the tutorial, however my sampling does not start or is very slow. I tried various permutations, as below, without success. Note, the data size is 300. Could someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

with pm.Model() as model:
# Which normal distribution?
p1 = pm.Uniform('p1', 0, 1)
p2 = 1 - p1
p = T.stack([p1, p2])
assign = pm.Categorical('assign', p, shape = data.values.shape[0], testval = np.random.randint
(0, 2, data.values.shape[0]))
# Priors
sdevs = pm.Uniform('sdevs', 0, 100, shape = 2)
means = pm.Normal('means', mu = np.array([120, 190]), sd = np.array([10, 10]), shape = 2)
means_ = pm.Deterministic("means_", means[assign])
sdevs_ = pm.Deterministic("sdevs_", sdevs[assign])
# Data
obs = pm.Normal('obs', mu = means_, sd = sdevs_, observed = data.values)

First, I let PyMC decide which routines to use and saw no results in 5 hours:

with model:
trace = pm.sample(25000)
Multiprocess sampling (4 chains in 4 jobs)
CompoundStep

NUTS: [means, sdevs, p1]
BinaryGibbsMetropolis: [assign]
Sampling 4 chains: 0%| | 24/102000 [5:03:59<40738:03:24, 1438.15s/draws

I also tried to be more prescriptive and attempted the following, but the sampler is very slow:
with model:
start = find_MAP(model = model)
step1 = pm.Metropolis(vars = [p, sdevs, means])
step2 = pm.ElemwiseCategorical(vars = [assign])
trace = pm.sample(25000, start = start, step = [step1, step2])
logp = -4.7305e+05, ||grad|| = 299.51: 100%|███████████████████████████████████████████| 39/39 [01:37<00:00, 2.51s/it]
C:\Users\bikim\AppData\Local\conda\conda\envs\pymc3p36\lib\site-packages\ipykernel_launcher.py:6: DeprecationWarning: ElemwiseCategorical is deprecated, switch to CategoricalGibbsMetropolis.

Multiprocess sampling (4 chains in 4 jobs)
CompoundStep

CompoundStep

Metropolis: [means]
Metropolis: [sdevs]
Metropolis: [p1]
ElemwiseCategorical: [assign]
Sampling 4 chains: 1%|▎ | 552/102000 [30:35<105:28:23, 3.74s/draws]

This should be an easy problem. I appreciate any insight into what I am doing wrong.

[fonnesbeck]

You've posted this issue to the wrong project. Please post to the PyMC3 issue tracker

[fonnesbeck]

Reading this issue further, I would recommend posting to the Discourse site rather than as an issue, as this is a usage question rather than a bug report.