Oh and regarding probabilistic stuff, I have been playing with PyMC, it seems eminently usable. There is some slightly more specialized software like Stan, and it is certainly worth looking at some Stan tutorials if you don't know anything about probabilistic programming, but PyMC is hackable and modular in a way that Stan is not. There is also tensorflow-probability but I couldn't get it to work, it seems not as active as PyMC. Haven't read it but I found https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programmin... and that's probably going to be my coffee table reading for the next few days.