## Stochastic processes as monad transformers

I have a difficulty to understand functional programming concepts that I can’t put to some very simple and natural use (natural for me, of course). I need to find the perfect simple example to implement to finally understand something. And I’m not a computer scientist, so things like parsers and compilers have very little appeal to me (probably because I don’t understand them…). I’m a physicist, so this drives me to look for physical problems that can be implemented in Haskell so I can understand some concepts.

Monad transformers still eludes me. But I think I finally got the perfect subject were I can understand them: stochastic processes! First some book keeping:

> import Control.Monad.State


Now, stochastic processes have characteristics related to two different monads. In one hand, they are dynamical processes, and the way to implement dynamics in Haskell is with state monads. For example, if I want to iterate the logistic map:

$\displaystyle x_{t+1} = \alpha x_t\left(1-x_t\right)$

I could do the following:

> f :: Double -> Double
> f x = 4*x*(1-x)

> logistic :: State Double Double
> logistic = do x0 <- get
>		let x1 = f x
>		put x1
>		return x1
> runLogistic :: State Double [Double]
> runLogistic n x0= evalState (replicateM n logistic) x0


Running this on ghci would give you, for example:

*Main> runLogistic 5 0.2
[0.6400000000000001,0.9215999999999999,0.28901376000000045,
0.8219392261226504,0.5854205387341]


So we can make the loose correspondence: dynamical system  ↔  state monad.

On the other hand, stochastic processes are compositions of random variables, and this is done with the Rand monad (found inControl.Monad.Random). As an example, the Box-Muller formula tells us that, if I have two inpendent random variables x and y, distributed uniformly between in the [0, 1] interval, then, the expression:

$\displaystyle \sqrt{-2\log(x)}\cos(2\pi y)$

will be normally distributed. We can write then (there’s a catch here: x and y are not independent, but sampled from the same pseudo-random number generator, with the same seed… this can be solved, but it would only complicate the example):

> boxmuller :: Double -> Double -> Double
> boxmuller x y = sqrt(-2*log x)*cos(2*pi*y)

> normal :: Rand StdGen Double
>  normal = do  x <- getRandom
>		y <- getRandom
>		return $boxmuller x y > normals n = replicateM n normal > gen = mkStdGen 0  Running this function we get what we need: *Main> (evalRand$ normals 5) gen =
[0.1600255836730147,0.1575360140445035,-1.595627933129274,
-0.18196791439834512,-1.082222285056746]


So what is a stochastic process? In very rough terms: is a dynamical system with random variables. So we need a way to make the Rand monad to talk nicely with the State monad. The way to do this is to use a monad transformer, in this case, the StateT transformer. Monad transformers allows you to combine the functionalities of two different monads. In the case of the StateT monads, they allow you to add a state to any other monad you want. In our case, we want to wrap the Rand monad inside a StateT transformer and work with things of type:

foo ::  StateT s (Rand StdGen) r


This type represent a monad that can store a state with type s, like the state monad, and can generate random variables of type r, like the rand monad. In general we would have a type

foo2 ::(MonadTrans t, Monad m) => t m a


In this case, t = StateT s and m = Rand StdGen. The class MonadTrans is defined in Control.Monad.Trans, and provides the function:

lift :: (MonadTrans t, Monad m) => m a -> t m a


In this case, t is itself a monad, and can be treated like one through the code. It works like this: inside a do expression you can use the lift function to access the inner monad. Things called with lift will operate in the inner monad. Things called without lift will operate in the outer monad.

So, suppose we want to simulate this very simple process:

$\displaystyle x_{t+1} = x_{t} + \eta_t$

where ηt is drawn from a normal distribution. We would do:

> randomWalk :: StateT Double (Rand StdGen) Double
> randomWalk = do eta <- lift normal
>                 x <- get
>                 let x' = x + eta
>                 put x'
>                 return x'
> runWalk :: Int -> Double -> StdGen -> [Double]
> runWalk n x0 gen = evalRand (replicateM n $evalStateT randomWalk x0) gen  The evalStateT function is just evalState adapted to run a StateT monad. Running this on ghci we get:  *Main> runWalk 5 0.0 gen [0.1600255836730147,0.1575360140445035,-1.595627933129274, -0.18196791439834512,-1.082222285056746]  This is what we can accomplish: we can easily operate simultaneously with functions that expect a state monad, like put and get, we can unwrap things with <- from the inner Rand monad by using lift , and we can return things to the state monad. We could have any monad inside theStateT transformer. For example, we could have another State monad. Here is a fancy implementation of the Fibonacci sequence using a State monad (that stores the last but one value in the sequence as its internal state) inside a StateT transfomer (that stores the last value of the sequence): > fancyFib :: StateT Int (State Int) Int > fancyFib = do old <- lift get > new <- get > let new' = new + old > old' = new > lift$ put old'
>               put new'
>               return new

> fancyFibs :: Int -> StateT Int (State Int) [Int]
> fancyFibs n = replicateM n fancyFibs


And we can run this to get:

*Main> evalState (evalStateT (fancyFibs 10) 1) 0
[1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55]


Final note: I expect this post to be usable as a literate haskell script. If you can’t run it, please let me know.

• Eloi Pereira  On August 12, 2011 at 03:20

Nice post. Since my background is on control theory I also like to think of State Monad as computations of dynamical systems. About your final note on literate Haskell, I believe I found two typos in the Logistic example:
> let x1 = f x
should be
> let x1 = f x0
and the type assertion
> runLogistic :: State Double [Double]
should be
> runLogistic :: Int -> Double -> [Double]

• jimstuttard  On June 1, 2012 at 08:20

Thanks for this post. I’m trying to write some stochastic code and cannot better your box-muller implementation. I can’t get runLogistic to type check with ghc-7.4.1 at all. Any ideas?

• Rafael S. Calsaverini  On June 1, 2012 at 08:24

Hi Jim,
I think I found the errors. Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll fix the code now.

There are the problems pointed out by Eloi above, and also there’s an extra’s on the “fancyFibs n = replicateM n fancyFibs“. This bold ‘s’ should not be there.

Also, if you copy the text from here directly to your text editor, there’s an alignment problem due to some misplaced characters. I’ll try to fix that too.

• jim Stuttard  On June 2, 2012 at 04:29

Hi Rafael,Thanks for the prompt reply. I caught the fibS. I’d like to integrate something like your code into the azimuthproject.org where we have a simple interactive stochastic bistability climate model.http://www.adgie.f9.co.uk/azimuth/stochastic-resonance/Javascript/StochasticResonanceEuler.html. The azimuth project was started by
John Baez for scientistis and engineers interested in global problems. We need programmers. I hope you don’t mind the plug..

• Rafael S. Calsaverini  On June 3, 2012 at 13:13

Hi Jim,
absolutely! Use this code in whatever is useful for you. The project seems to be quite interesting. I’ll take a look.

Thanks for pointing it ouy.