Dear Stan community,
@jonah, @mjskay, @mans_magnusson, @avehtari, @rok_cesnovar and I have been working on the beta release of our R package ‘posterior’ in the last couple of weeks. It is intended to provide useful tools for both users and developers of packages for fitting Bayesian models or working with output from Bayesian models. The primary goals of the package are to:
- Efficiently convert between many different useful formats of draws (samples) from posterior or prior distributions.
- Provide consistent methods for operations commonly performed on draws, for example, subsetting, binding, or mutating draws.
- Provide various summaries of draws in convenient formats.
- Provide lightweight implementations of state of the art posterior inference diagnostics.
Our plan is to use posterior in all of our R packages wherever we work with posterior (or prior) draws to have a unified and consistent interface that users and developers can rely on.
With the beta release, the user interface should be quite stable already but we need your help to iron out bugs and find other needs for improvements before our first CRAN release.
You can find the package on the stan-dev github repo (https://github.com/stan-dev/posterior) and https://mc-stan.org/posterior/.
Have a great day and don’t forget to try out posterior!