Refactor argument validation?

[tillahoffmann]

What are your thoughts on refactoring the argument validation code below into a separate method validate_args() (or another name) so it can be invoked on an existing instance? The motivation is that I often have jitted functions that return distribution instances which I would like to validate.

numpyro/numpyro/distributions/distribution.py

Lines 231 to 246 in 94f4b99

	if self._validate_args:
	for param, constraint in self.arg_constraints.items():
	if param not in self.__dict__ and isinstance(
	getattr(type(self), param), lazy_property
	):
	continue
	if constraints.is_dependent(constraint):
	continue # skip constraints that cannot be checked
	is_valid = constraint(getattr(self, param))
	if not_jax_tracer(is_valid):
	if not np.all(is_valid):
	raise ValueError(
	"{} distribution got invalid {} parameter.".format(
	self.__class__.__name__, param
	)
	)

[fehiepsi]

Yup, exposing that method would be convenient.