StanCon 2020 is on Thursday!

For all that registered for the conference, THANK YOU! We, the organizers, are truly moved by how global and inclusive the community has become.

We are currently at 230 registrants from 33 countries. And 25 scholarships were provided to people in 12 countries.

Please join us. Registration is $50. We have scholarships still available (more info on the registration page).

Updates

  • Videos for contributed talks and developer talks are online! Register now and you’ll be sent a password.
  • Our plenary speakers have all been confirmed (these will happen live at StanCon):
    • Seth Flaxman; Imperial College, London; “Hierarchical Models for Covid – identifying effects of lockdown and an R package”
    • Moriba Jah; Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences; “Multi-Source Information Modeling, Curation, and Fusion Enabling Transdisciplinary Decision-Making: A Case for Space!”
    • David Shor; “STAN and US Politics”
  • Thank you to our sponsors, Metrum Research Group and Jumping Rivers!
  • We’ve increased the number of scholarships and they are still available!

If you’re on the fence about whether to attend, we’ve done our best to bring out what makes StanCon special: the Stan Community. For a few hours, you get to spend time with Stan users and developers from around the world, sitting at tables discussing things that you’d discuss at StanCon.

Continue reading

StanCon 2020 program is now online!

This year’s Stan Conference is on August 13, 2020 (next Thursday)! The program has been finalized and is online. So far, we’re at 89 registrants spanning across 17 countries!

Registration is $50, which includes swag. There are scholarships available for those that need financial support. If you’re a Stan developer, there’s a discount (see the forums).

Our vision for this year’s conference:

  • All virtual.
    We’re trying our best to enable the interactions at StanCon that make the event special. We’re using a service, Remo, that has tables where people can gather around and chat.
  • Global and inclusive.
    There are 3 sessions that last 2-3 hours that are spaced 8 hours apart. Each session has its own plenary speaker and six discussions (total: 3 plenaries, 18 contributed talks, and 4 developer talks). One of the contributed talks will be recorded in 6 languages (English, Catalan, Spanish, Hindi, French, Finnish)!
  • The format.
    All contributed talks will be distributed and available prior to the conference. For each contributed talk, there will be a 10 minute live Q&A with the presenter and a discussant. During the conference, we’re debuting the plenary talks and developer talks.

Thank you to Metrum Research Group for being our first sponsor!
If you’d like to sponsor StanCon, please email [email protected]. Sponsorship goes towards scholarships and the cost of running the conference.

StanCon 2020 registration is live!

Dear Stan Community, 

The StanCon Organizing Committee is glad to communicate the registration for the virtual StanCon 2020 is now live. Please visit the registration page (see: https://stancon.mc-stan.org/) to purchase your tickets. 

The conference will be a 24-hours event with three main sessions spanning across different time zones (British Summer Time, Eastern Time and Pacific Time) and the purchase of the ticket will include: 

  • Attendance to all three sessions (there will be no parallel sessions). 
  • Swag delivered to your specified address. 
  • Virtual network and poster sessions.

Scholarships will be made available for members of the community needing financial support to cover the cost of the tickets. For details on scholarship applications please visit the registration website.

Once registered, you will receive details and links on how to access the conference platform we will be using for the virtual event. There will be no need to download a conference app, however we do encourage to use either Chrome or Mozilla as these browsers have better support for the conference platform. 

A detailed list of the speakers and sessions will be posted on July 30th on the registration site. The live discussions will cover applied topics using Stan, new packages and extensions, visualizations in the context of Bayesian analysis and updates on the from key contributors. 

Finally, if you wish to support Stan, consider donating to the project to continue supporting our development team and technical services. Your donation is tax-deductible and you can donate here

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at StanCon!

 

Thank you everyone,

Kelli, Simon, Daniel and Sue.

Stan Conference Organizing Committee

StanCon 2020. A 24h Global Event. (More details, new talk deadline: July 1)

Date Confirmed: Thursday, 13 August 2020

The Stan Conference will be virtual this year! We are aiming for a 24-hour conference that can bring the global Stan community together. There will be 3 scheduled blocks of time, each with a plenary talk and discussion for six contributed talks. Since the conference is virtual, we’re distributing most of the content ahead of the schedule.

We were looking forward to seeing everyone in person but we are excited for the opportunity to develop and deliver a virtual event that will include ways of interacting with fellow conference attendees and presenters. If it works well we will consider a hybrid model for future conferences to ensure everyone, regardless of location and/or budget, can access and attend StanCon.

The Format

Attendees can take part in virtual networking, attend presentations and engage with the 18 presenters. Each block of time is scheduled similarly. Each block will have a plenary talk and 6 separate discussions of a contributed talk. Contributed talks will be pre-recorded and the content distributed online prior to the conference.

The schedule will look (roughly) like this:

– 4min – Welcome from the StanCon Committee
– 6min – 6×1 minute recorded pitch
– 50min – Plenary talk + Discussion
– 10min – Talk 1: 1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion
– 10min – Talk 2: 1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion
– 10min – Talk 3: 1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion
– 10min – Talk 4: 1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion
– 10min – Talk 5: 1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion
– 10min – Talk 6: 1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion
– 60min – Post-session virtual coffee/drinks

What to expect

For attendees

We are adapting to the challenges of an online conference the best we can. We will have guides available for getting into the conference and participating.

We hope that the attendees can participate in the discussions and can have plenty of interaction with the other attendees.

All are welcome and we will be enforcing a code of conduct for the benefit of the community. This will be a registered event. The content distributed will be available online without registration, but in order to participate live, we will be requiring registration.

We will be putting up guides, the agenda and a link to register closer to the event.

For contributors

Since this is virtual, the format and requirements for the talks will be different. These things are expected before and during the event:

Presenters must send the following by the deadline:

– Bio [100 words] and summary of your talk [300 words] 1 July.
The StanCon committee will notify acceptance by 8 July.
– A pre-recorded 20 minute talk once the talk has been accepted. We will help with video editing and distributing the content. We will send out some technical information about how to format slides, etc. (If you are comfortable in multiple languages, feel free to record multiple videos!) 24 July
– A pre-recorded 1 minute pitch of the talk. The purpose of this is to let the audience know what the talk is and to jog their memory. 24 July
– Provide consent for StanCon to share their talk online at the conference and on YouTube

24 July

If you have already sent your talk proposal and wish to continue participating under the virtual format, we will ask you to fill the google form again under the time zone you would prefer to participate.

If you’re not in one of these time zones, please feel free to select any one of these links:

1. StanCon 2020 Talk proposal UK (London Time)
2. StanCon 2020 Talk proposal US (Eastern Time)
3. StanCon 2020 Talk Proposal US (Pacific Time)

POTENTIAL SCHEDULE

 

British Summer Time (BST) Eastern Time (ET) Pacific Time (PT) Length (min) Global Schedule
8:30 3:30 0:30 30 Pre-session virtual coffee (TBC)
9:00 4:00 1:00 4 Live Welcome from StanCon UK Committee
9:04 4:04 1:04 6 6x (1 minute recorded pitch)
9:10 4:10 1:10 40 Live Plenary talk
9:50 4:50 1:50 10 Live Discussion
10:00 5:00 2:00 60 6x (1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion)
11:00 6:00 3:00 60 Post-session virtual coffee/drinks (TBC)
12:00 7:00 4:00 Break
16:30 11:30 8:30 30 Pre-session virtual coffee (TBC)
17:00 12:00 9:00 10 Live Welcome from StanCon UK + US Committee + StanCon 2021 announcement
17:10 12:10 9:10 4 Code of Conduct working group
17:14 12:14 9:14 6 6x (1 minute recorded pitch)
17:20 12:20 9:20 40 TBD
18:00 13:00 10:00 40 Live Main Plenary talk
18:50 13:50 10:50 10 Live Discussion
19:00 14:00 11:00 60 6x (1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion)
20:00 15:00 12:00 60 Post-session virtual coffee/drinks (TBC)
21:00 16:00 13:00 Break
0:30 19:30 16:30 30 Pre-session virtual coffee (TBC)
1:00 20:00 17:00 4 Live Welcome from StanCon Committee
1:04 20:04 17:04 6 6x (1 minute recorded pitch)
1:10 20:10 17:10 40 Live Plenary talk
1:50 20:50 17:50 10 Live Discussion
2:00 21:00 28:00 60 6x (1 minute recorded pitch + 9 minute live discussion)
3:00 22:00 19:00 60 Post-session virtual coffee/drinks (TBC)
4:00 23:00 20:00 Break

https://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2020/

StanCon 2020: August 11-14. Registration now open!

The 5th Stan Conference will be at Oregon State University on August 11-14, 2020. Register here: https://stancon2020.eventbrite.com

The four-day event will be two days of tutorials and two days of talks, open discussions, and statistical modeling. Up-to-date information can be found at https://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2020.

Registration Fees

Registration fees cover the entire 4-day conference. This includes coffee and lunch and a conference dinner on Wednesday night.

Early Registration (rates go up May 1, 2020)

  • Student: $150
  • Academic: $300
  • Industry: $450

Register here: https://stancon2020.eventbrite.com

Invited Speakers

We are pleased to have Dr. Elizabeth M. Wolkovich. Second speaker to be announced.

Tutorials

Basics of Bayesian inference and Stan. August 11-12 all day.

Instructor Jonah Gabry.

Description:

We will review some of the foundational concepts in Bayesian statistics that are essential background for anyone interested in using Bayesian methods in practice. Then we will introduce the Stan language and the recommended workflow for applied Bayesian data analysis by working through an example analysis together. Since we only have 2 days for this tutorial it will be beneficial for participants to have at least some previous experience with statistical modeling, but prior experience fitting Bayesian models is not a requirement. We will be interfacing with Stan from R, but users of Python and other languages/platforms can still benefit from the tutorial as all of the code we write in the Stan language (and all of the modeling techniques and concepts covered) can be used with any of the Stan interfaces.

Additional Tutorials

More tutorials to be announced.

Call for proposals

We are seeking proposals for:

  1. tutorials: either half-day or full-day
  2. thematic sessions: half-day sessions of talks in a single theme
  3. contributed talks
  4. posters

Please see https://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2020 for more details.

Organizers:

  • Susana Marquez. The Rockefeller Foundation.
  • Eric J. Ward. Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NOAA).
  • Debashis Mondal. Statistics Department. Oregon State University.
  • Yi Zhang. Metrum Research Group.
  • Daniel Lee. Generable.

StanCon 2018 Live Stream — bad news…. not enough bandwidth

Breaking news: no live stream. We’re recording, so we’ll put the videos online after the fact.

We don’t have enough bandwidth to live stream today.

 

 


 

StanCon 2018 starts today! We’re going to try our best to live stream the event on YouTube.

We have the same video setup as last year, but may be limited by internet bandwidth here at Asilomar.

If we’re up, we will these YouTube events on the Stan YouTube Channel (all times Pacific):

 

StanCon2018: one month to go, schedule finalized, over 20 talks, 6 tutorials… and flights are cheap

StanCon2018 is shaping up nicely as a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in all things Stan, meet Stan developers and fellow users. Registration is still open, but spots are filling up fast. We’re at 130 registrants and counting!

The draft schedule is now up. We have 16 accepted talks and 6 invited talks. Posters are still being accepted for our “Wear your poster” reception.

There are 6 tutorials:

  • Intro to Stan (8hrs over 4 sessions)
  • Advanced Hierarchical Models
  • Gaussian Processes
  • How to develop for Stan at the C++ level
  • Bayesian Decision Making for Executives and Those who Communicate with them
  • Have I Converged Successfully? How to verify fit and diagnose fit problems.

And there’s a 2 hour data/modeling session where you can get feedback on your data/models from Stan developers/modelers.

We have fun after dinner activities like R/C Airplane building/flying, non-snobby blind wine tasting and bonfire s’mores.

Go to http://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2018 and register! StanCon2018 is happening at the beautiful Asilomar conference facility at the beach in Monterey California for three days starting January 10, 2018.

 

StanCon2018 Organizing Committee

P.S. Thanks to our sponsors: Facebook, Metrum, Generable, and Jumping Rivers.

StanCon2018 Early Registration ends Nov 10

StanCon is happening at the beautiful Asilomar conference facility at the beach in Monterey California for three days starting January 10, 2018. We have space for 200 souls and this will sell out.

If you don’t already know, Stan is the rising star of probabilistic modeling with Bayesian analysis. If you do statistics, machine learning or data science then you need to know about Stan.

StanCon offers a full schedule of invited talks, submitted papers, and tutorials unavailable in any other format. Balancing the intellectual intensity of cutting edge statistical modeling are fun activities like indoor R/C airplane building/flying/designing and non-snobby blind wine tasting for after dinner activities. We will have the first ever “wear your poster” reception–see the call for posters below. And no parallel sessions–you get the entire StanCon2018, not a slice.

Go to http://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2018 and register.

Invited Talks

  • Andrew Gelman
    Department of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University
  • Susan Holmes
    Department of Statistics, Stanford University
  • Frank Harrell, Jr.
    School of Medicine and Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
  • Sophia Rabe-Hesketh
    Educational Statistics and Biostatistics, University of California, Berkeley
  • Sean Taylor and Ben Letham
    Facebook Core Data Science
  • Manuel Rivas
    Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
  • Talia Weiss
    Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

These rock stars have agreed to leave their entourages, groupies and bad habits at home and will start their shows talks on time and leave you wanting more.

Submitted talks:

We have 18 accepted talks ranging from public policy viewed through Bayesian analysis to painful theory papers. And we have Facebook, and space people from NASA. Talks are self-contained knitr or Jupyter notebooks that will be made publicly available after the conference.

Tutorials

We have tutorials that start at the crack of 8am for those desiring further edification beyond the awesome program. Total time ranges from 6 hours to 1 hour depending on topic—these will be parallel but don’t conflict with the main conference.

  • Introduction to Stan
    Know how to program? Know basic statistics? Curious about Bayesian analysis and Stan? This is the course for you. Hands on, focused and an excellent way to get started working in Stan. 2 hours every morning 8am to 10am.
  • Executive decision making the Bayesian way
    This is for nontechnical managers to learn the core of decision making under uncertainty and how to interpret the talks that they will be attending the rest of the day. 1 hour/day every day.
  • Advanced Modeling in Stan
    The hard stuff led by the best of the best. Very interactive, very intense. Varying topics, every day 1-2 hours.

Poster call for participation

We will take poster submissions on a rolling basis until December 5th. One page exclusive of references is the desired format but anything that gives us enough information to make a decision is fine. We will accept/reject within 48 hours. Send to [email protected].

The only somewhat odd requirement is that your poster must be “wearable” to the 5pm reception where you will be a walking presentation. Great way to network, signboard supplies will be available so you need only have sheets of paper which can be attached to signboard material which coincidentally will be the source airframe material for the R/C airplane activities following dinner.

Fun Stuff

Learning is fun but we anticipate that blowing off a little steam will be called for.

  • R/C Airplanes
    After dinner on day 1 we will provide designs and building materials to create your own R/C airplane. The core design can be scratch built in 90 minutes or less at which point, and weather dependent, we will learn to fly our planes indoors or outdoors. See http://brooklynaerodrome.com for an idea of the style of airplane. You can also create your own designs and we will have night illumination gear.
  • Snob-free Blind Wine Tasting
    By day 2 you will have gotten to know your fellow attendees so some social adventure is called for. This activity has proved wildly successful at DARPA conferences and they invented the internet so it can’t be all bad. Participants taste wines without knowing what they are.
    That’s it! StanCon2018 is going to be a pressure cooker of learning and fun. Don’t miss it.

Early registration

Early bird registration ends 10 November 2017.

Go to http://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2018 and register.

 

StanCon Organizing Committee

Job opening for a Stan user in pharma

Perceval Sondag is hiring for a Junior Statistician at Arlenda. Although the official post doesn’t mention it, Perceval writes:

On the other hand, I’ll be the one conducting the interviews and I can tell you that the knowledge of Stan, at least at a basic level for a junior/intern, is something that I require to work with me.

Here’s the description:

Arlenda is a company specialized in statistical consulting services to the (Bio)pharmaceutical industry. In the early clinical field, we provide full statistical services from protocol to reporting, and clinical trial simulations. In the field of Non-Clinical Statistics, we partner with clients to reduce risk and improve efficiency across the product lifecycle, from development laboratory to manufacturing floor. Arlenda is a leader in Quality by Design methodology, and a recognized expert in the practical application of Bayesian statistics. Arlenda also offers clients validated statistical software to speed development and assure compliance of critical laboratory applications, such as creation and validation of assays.

Perceval sent this updated pdf. If you’re interested, please send a cv to [email protected].

Thanks for attending StanCon 2017!

Thank you all for coming and making the first Stan Conference a success! The organizers were blown away by how many people came to the first conference. We had over 150 registrants this year!

StanCon 2017 Video

The organizers managed to get a video stream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DJ0c7Bm5Djk. We have over 1900 views since StanCon! (We lost audio during the Q&A and the video quality isn’t the greatest, but it’s better than nothing.)

Contributed Talks

The contributed talks are all online: http://mc-stan.org/events/stancon. By following the links, you can access the HTML versions, the code, and links to the video of the presenter.

Sponsors

We’d like to thank our sponsors once again. Without our sponsors, we wouldn’t have been able to run the conference.

  • Columbia University Data Science Institute
    The Data Science Institute at Columbia University is training the next generation of data scientists and developing innovative technology to serve society. Many DSI faculty and students use Stan in their research. In addition some Stan developers are part of DSI.
  • Facebook Research
    Facebook Research uses Stan to implement production data science tools, primarily for its ability to streamline advanced model fitting and simple integration with R and Python. They also use Stan for estimation/inference in research projects, for instance to analyze the results of complex experiments.
  • Metrum Research Group
    Metrum Research Group is increasingly using Stan for Bayesian analysis of a range of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data. Most often we use hierarchical models for the analysis of longitudinal data from multiple individual patients in clinical trials. The results are used to aid decision-making clinical development programs, e.g., dosing regimen optimization, design of future clinical trials, go/no-go decisions.
  • Real Capital Analytics
    Real Capital Analytics is the authority on the deals, players and trends driving commercial real estate investments. They use Stan to create their real estate index.
  • Stan Group
    Stan Group is building a cloud compute platform for making decisions under uncertainty. They are backed by Techstars. Stan Group uses Stan to help pharma companies estimate models for early stage cancer research, baseball teams to estimate player abilities, a sports betting market place to assess the skill of the bettors, and many others.

Thanks again for coming to the first Stan Conference. We hope to see you at the next one!

— Daniel, on behalf of the Stan Conference Organizing Committee

Stan Conference Live Stream

StanCon 2017 is tomorrow! Late registration ends in an hour. After that, all tickets are $400.

We’re going to be live streaming the conference. You’ll find the stream as a YouTube Live event from 8:45 am to 6 pm ET (and whatever gets up will be recorded by default). We’re streaming it ourselves, so if there are technical difficulties, we may have to stop early.

We’re on Twitter and you can track the conference with the #stancon2017 hashtag.

 

30 tickets left to StanCon 2017! New sponsor!

Stan Conference 2017 is on Saturday. We just sold our 150th ticket! Capacity is 180. It’s going to be an amazing event. Register here (while tickets are still available): https://stancon2017.eventbrite.com

Our Q&A Panel will have some members of the Stan Development Team:

  • Andrew Gelman. Stan super user.
  • Bob Carpenter. Stan language, math library.
  • Michael Betancourt. Stan algorithms, math library.
  • Daniel Lee. Math library, CmdStan, how everything fits together.
  • Ben Goodrich. RStan, RStanArm, math library.
  • Jonah Gabry. ShinyStan, and all packages downstream of RStan.
  • Allen Riddell. PyStan.

This only represents about half of the Stan developers at StanCon! Logistically, we just can’t have everyone on stage.

 

Sponsors

A big thanks to our sponsors! Without their contributions, we really couldn’t have secured the space and the services for the conference. Here are our sponsors (in order of sponsoring StanCon):

Live Stream

We’re going to live stream StanCon 2017. I’ll post more details later this week. I’m still working out technical details. We are running the live stream ourselves, so I’m sure we’ll have technical difficulties. I’d really suggest attending in person if you are able.

 

StanCon 2017 Schedule

The first Stan Conference is next Saturday, January 21, 2017!

If you haven’t registered, here’s the link: https://stancon2017.eventbrite.com

I wouldn’t wait until the last minute—we might sell out before you’re able to grab a ticket. We’re up to 125 registrants now. If we have any space left, tickets will be $400 at the door.

Schedule. January 21, 2017.

Time What
7:30 AM – 8:45 AM Registration and breakfast
8:45 AM – 9:00 AM Opening statements
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM Dev talk:
Andrew Gelman:
“10 Things I Hate About Stan”
10:00 AM – 10:30 AM Coffee
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Contributed talks:

  1. Jonathan Auerbach, Rob Trangucci:
    “Twelve Cities: Does lowering speed limits save pedestrian lives?”
  2. Milad Kharratzadeh:
    “Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of the English Premier League”
  3. Victor Lei, Nathan Sanders, Abigail Dawson:
    “Advertising Attribution Modeling in the Movie Industry”
  4. Woo-Young Ahn, Nate Haines, Lei Zhang:
    “hBayesDM: Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of decision-making tasks”
  5. Charles Margossian, Bill Gillespie:
    “Differential Equation Based Models in Stan”
12:00 PM – 1:15 PM Lunch
1:15 PM – 2:15 PM Dev talk:
Michael Betancourt:
“Everything You Should Have Learned About Markov Chain Monte Carlo”
2:15 PM – 2:30 PM Stretch break
2:30 PM – 3:45 PM Contributed talks:

  1. Teddy Groves:
    “How to Test IRT Models Using Simulated Data”
  2. Bruno Nicenboim, Shravan Vasishth:
    “Models of Retrieval in Sentence Comprehension”
  3. Rob Trangucci:
    “Hierarchical Gaussian Processes in Stan”
  4. Nathan Sanders, Victor Lei:
    “Modeling the Rate of Public Mass Shootings with Gaussian Processes”
3:45 PM – 4:45 PM Mingling and coffee
4:45 PM – 5:45 PM Q&A Panel
5:45 PM – 6:00 PM Closing remarks:
Bob Carpenter:
“Where is Stan Going Next?”

If you can’t tell, it’s going to be a packed day.

Sponsors

We couldn’t have done this without support from our sponsors. Seriously.

Bonus: All of our sponsors are using Stan!

StanCon is coming! Sat, 1/21/2017

[Update: There’s a more recent post with the schedule.]

 

Save the date! The first Stan conference is going to be in NYC in January. Registration will open at the end of September.

 

When:

Saturday, January 21, 2017

9 am – 5 pm

 

Where:

Davis Auditorium, Columbia University

530 West 120th Street

4th floor (campus level), room 412

New York, NY 10027

 

Registration:

Registration will open at the end of September.

 

Early registration (on or before December 20, 2016):

– Student: $50

– Academic: $100

– Industry: $200

This will include coffee, lunch, and some swag.

 

Late Registration (December 21, 2016 and on):

– Student: $75

– Academic: $150

– Industry: $300

This will include coffee and lunch. Probably won’t get swag.

 

Contributed talks:

We’re looking for contributed talks. We will start accepting submissions at the end of September.

The contributed talks at StanCon will be based on interactive, self-contained notebooks, such as knitr or Jupyter, that will also take the place of proceedings.  For example, you might demonstrate a novel modeling technique or a simplified version of a novel application. Each submission should include the notebook and separate files containing the Stan program, data, initializations if used, and a permissive license for everything such as CC BY 4.0.

 

Tentative Schedule:

8:00- 9:00 Registration / Coffee / Breakfast

9:00 – 9:20 Opening remarks

9:20 – 10:30 Session 1

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 – 12:30 Session 2

12:30 – 2:00 Lunch

2:00 – 3:15 Session 3

3:15 – 3:45 Coffee break

3:45 – 5:00 Session 4

 

Sponsorship:

We are looking for some sponsorship to either defer costs or provide travel assistance. Please email [email protected] for more information.

 

Organizers:

Michael Betancourt (Columbia University)

Tamara Broderick (MIT)

Jonah Gabry (Columbia University)

Andrew Gelman (Columbia University)

Ben Goodrich (Columbia University)

Daniel Lee (Columbia University)

Eric Novik (Stan Group Inc)

Lizzie Wolkovich (Harvard University)

 

NYC Stan meetup 12 December

The next NYC Stan meetup is on Saturday:

Feel free to bring things you’re working on or join in on projects some of the others are working on. A couple of the developers will be around to answer questions and help out.

If you don’t have anything to work on, the Stan team could use help with setting up the examples repository to be more friendly.

If you’re planning on coming, please register here.

 

RStan 2.8.0 is on CRAN!

RStan 2.8.0 is available on CRAN!

Installation directions can be found on RStan’s Wiki.

And since I know a lot of people aren’t patient enough to read through installation instructions, the most important parts are:

  1. You (still) need a C++ toolchain.
    Mac: XCode. Make sure to open it once after download to accept the license.
    Windows: Rtools. Make sure the binaries are on your Windows path.Linux. If you don’t have a C++ toolchain in Linux, you should probably rethink your operating system.
  2. From within R:
    > install.packages("rstan", dependencies = TRUE)

    I don’t know why you need dependencies, but maybe the RStan gurus can explain.

  3. Restart R before using RStan. Please.
    This is another thing that I don’t understand, but it does solve a lot of problems.

As always, if you run into trouble, let us know on the stan-users mailing list.

Stan users meetup in Cambridge, MA on 9/22

There’s a new Stan users meetup group in Boston / Camberville. The first meeting will be on Tuesday, 9/22, at 6 pm in Cambridge.

If you’re a seasoned Stan user, just starting out with Stan, or hearing about Stan for the first time, feel free to join in. At least a couple of the Stan core developers will be around to answer questions.

 

Sign up here: Stan Users – Boston/Camberville

Thanks to Lizzie Wolkovich for organizing the meetup! And thanks to RStudio for providing food and drinks for the meetup.

 

P.S. Dustin has some Stan stickers. Go find Dustin at the meetup if you want one.
P.P.S. If you want to organize a meetup in your neighborhood, it’s not difficult. Let me know and I’ll provide as much support as I can.

 

More Stan on the blog

Whoa. Stan is 3 years old. We’ve come a long way since the start. I came into the project just as a working prototype was implemented by Matt and Bob with discussions with Andrew, Ben, Michael Malecki, Jiqiang, and others. (I had been working for Andrew prior to the official start of the project, but was on the injured reserve list at the time.)

Just for kicks, I looked back at the documentation and the commit log for v1.0.0. The first version was fully functional — it was definitely more than just a prototype. I remember feeling a bit nervous about the release, but not really apprehensive. Most of our meetings were about how we could make Stan faster and what we wanted to implement next.

Fast forward 3 years and Stan is still moving along. We now have a family of projects. We’ve split the math and automatic differentiation library into it’s own Stan Math Library, the Stan Library is being shaped into the language and the inference algorithms, there are interfaces for the command line, R, Python, Julia, Matlab, Stata, and additional supporting libraries like ShinyStan, stan-mode (syntax highlighting for emacs), and some more stuff coming down the line. We’re still talking about how to make Stan faster and what to implement next.

I’m going to start posting more regularly on the blog with Stan-related posts:
– general advice
– how to do easy stuff
– how to do expert stuff
– walk-throughs of models
– ideas that we want help on

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Stan’s 3rd birthday!

Stan v1.0.0 was released on August 30, 2012. We’ve come a long way since.

If you’re around and want to celebrate with some Stan developers and users, feel free to join us:

Monday, August 31.
6 – 9 pm
Untamed Sandwiches
43 W 39th St
New York, NY

If you didn’t know, we also have a Stan Users NYC group that meets every few months.

Thanks and hope to see some of you there.