Documentation

Documentation

Stan User’s Guide

The Stan user’s guide provides example models and programming techniques for coding statistical models in Stan. It also serves as an example-driven introduction to Bayesian modeling and inference. For versions 2.18 and later, this is titled Stan User’s Guide. For versions 2.17 and earlier, this is part of the Stan Reference Manual.

Stan Language Reference Manual

The manual for Stan’s programming language for coding probability models, inference algorithms for fitting models and making predictions, and posterior analysis tools for evaluating the results. This manual applies to all Stan interfaces.

Stan Language Functions Reference

The reference for the functions defined in the Stan math library and available in the Stan programming language. For versions 2.17 and earlier, this is part of the Stan Reference Manual.

Stan Software Development Lifecycle

The software development practices underlying the code managed by the Stan project is hosted at

CmdStan Documentation

CmdStanR, CmdStanPy Documentation

CmdStanPy and CmdStanR provide access to the latest version of Stan, or earlier versions, as specified. They use minimal memory beyond what is used by CmdStan itself to run and record an analysis, therefore they can be used to fit more complex models and/or large datasets.

RStan Documentation

PyStan Documentation

Case Studies and Notebooks

Case studies provide longer, more-detailed discussion of various applications, models, and methodologies. Each case study is written in knitr or Jupyter notebooks so that the discussion is accompanied with working code. Case studies written or validated by the Stan development team can be found at

The proceedings of each Stan Conference also take the form of self-contained notebooks. StanCon notebooks are hosted on GitHub along with other materials from the conferences:

Tutorials

The Stan development team and many users have contributed tutorials aimed at introducing users to various aspects of statistical modeling with Stan, both in written and visual formats. These tutorials can be found at

Specialized Field Guides

Tutorials, case studies, software packages, and publications related to specific fields. These pages are maintained by volunteers from the Stan community. If you would like to contribute one for your field please reach out on the Stan forums.

The Stan Forums

The most up to date discussion of modeling techniques and computational issues if often found in the Stan Forums before it ends up in a case study or a paper.

Discussions prior to June 2017 are archived and public on the now deprecated Stan Users Google Group.

GitHub Stan Developer Wiki

The Stan Wiki is largely focused on development documentation but it also includes a few pages with helpful information for users.

One particularly recommended page is

Further References

Finally, there are many works that elaborate on aspects of Stan from algorithms to applications. Some of the more relevant references can be found at