A question on "stan cannot deal with discrete parameters"

[stevebronder]

Just wanted to throw this out there, post a while back about using CONCRETE or REBAR methods in stan for discrete params

Finally A Way to Model Discrete Parameters in Stan

I’d suggest something like simple mixtures (one discrete parameter per data point) change point (one discrete parameter with 200 possible values) HMM decoding (lots of linked discrete parameters); that is, set up training data (x, y), use it to estimate parameters p(theta | x, y), then give it some new x’ and let it predict new y’. Cormack-Jolly-Seber mark-recapture : the animals live/death state is discrete and marginalized out in the Stan example Dawid-Skene model – discrete p…

Though it appears no one took the final steps to do the comparisons from the stan manual on marginalization vs. these methods