# Why tinygp?¶

There are many Python libraries that exist for Gaussian Process (GP) modeling, so one might ask: (a) why does tinygp exist and (b) why might someone want to use it?

## Why does tinygp exist?¶

Its development started as an experiment because I wanted to figure out how to best leverage jax to build a minimal, but flexible and high performance GP library. I also wanted to learn some of the subtleties of designing a jax-based library.

A fundamental design decision is that tinygp does not offer implementations of any inference routines. Instead it only provides an expressive interface for designing GP kernels and defining the relevant jax operations. Because of the composable nature of jax code, this high-level interface is compatible with other jax-based modeling frameworks such as numpyro and flax. This design has some benefits (it can take advantage of these excellent existing libraries and any fast linear algebra available in jax) and some shortcomings (it won’t necessarily support all the state-of-the-art GP inference algorithms out of the box).