Bugs in Pedantic Mode

Developers
1

Hi, Aki and I were playing around with some simple examples and found things that pedantic mode wasn’t catching. See below.
Andrew

–

First we created a model with three parameters, two of which had no prior:

parameters {
  real a;
  real b;
  real c;
}
model {
  a ~ normal(0, 1);
}

Pedantic mode returned: “Warning: The parameter c was declared but was not used in the density calculation.”

But what about the parameter b?

Here’s another:

data {
  real y;
}
parameters {
  real a;
  real b;
  real c;
}
model {
  y ~ normal(a + b + c, 1);
}

This time, pedantic returned, “Warning: The parameter c has no priors.
Warning: The parameter b has no priors.”

What happened to a?

1 Like
2

Bizarre! Thanks for reporting.

3

Hmm, these examples work fine on my local Stanc3 build. It seems like the interface clipped off the last line of the warnings. Was this CmdStanR?

Edit:
I noticed that the way Stanc3 prints out warnings has some weird formatting that could have caused this. I fixed that, but we should also probably fix this whatever interface you were using.

4

Will do, thanks!