General Documentation

The official Stan documentation website https://mc-stan.org/docs/ contains

• the Stan User’s Guide which provides example models, programming techniques for building statistical models in Stan, and methods for calibration and model checking.

• the Stan Reference Manual which specifies the Stan programming language and inference algorithms.

• the Stan Functions Reference

CmdStan, CmdStanR, CmdStanPy Documentation

CmdStan is the command-line interface to Stan. New versions are released several times a year. CmdStanR and CmdStanPy provide access to CmdStan from R and Python, respectively. They use minimal memory beyond what is used by CmdStan itself to run and record an analysis, therefore they can be used to fit complex models and/or large datasets. They are highly recommended for users on Windows machines.

• CmdStan User’s Guide

• CmdStanR Vignettes, tutorials, and other package information

• CmdStanPy documentation

RStan Documentation

• RStan Vignettes, tutorials, and other package information

PyStan Documentation

• PyStan Documentation on readthedocs.org

The Stan Forums

Discussion of modeling techniques and computational issues.

• Stan Forums (Discourse)

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

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

• Case Studies

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:

• StanCon Materials     (GitHub, with video links)

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

• Tutorials

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.

• Stan for Education Research   (GitHub)

• Stan for Ecology   (GitHub)

• Stan for Epidemiology   (GitHub)

• Stan for Cognitive Science   (GitHub)

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.

• Stan Wiki     (GitHub)

One particularly recommended page is

• Prior Choice Recommendations     (GitHub)

which specifies the functions built into the Stan programming language.

Stan Software Development Lifecycle

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

• Stan Software Development Lifecycle

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

• External References