Interest in GSoC 2026: Priorsense improvements

Google Summer of Code
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Hi everyone

My name is Emanuele, I am an applied math and data science master’s student and I am interested in the GSoC 2026 project Priorsense improvements.

I submitted a small Pull Request. It resolves an explicit TODO in R/plots.R by optimizing the expansion of indexed variables.

Additionally, I have been thinking about the scalability of the package for high-dimensional models . I have put together a short Notebook as proof of concept outlining a potential mathematical optimization as well as a more classic software engineering one. For the former, my core idea is to introduce a screening phase to filter out and avoid performing the Importance Sampling on every single parameter. This is done by using the variance of the log-likelihood thanks to which we could analytically approximate the KL divergence for small perturbations.

Since this is my first time participating in Google Summer of Code, I have questions on how to draft the proposal and process for you. Specifically:

  1. Is there a specific proposal template preferred by Stan that I should follow?

  2. How precise and granular should the weekly timeline and technical implementation details be at this stage?

  3. Would you be open to taking a quick look at my Notebook or draft of the proposal to let me know if this direction aligns with your vision for the project?

I look forward to your feedback

Emanuele

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Thanks for your interest! Tagging @n-kall, @avehtari, @Florence_Bockting, and @Osvaldo_Martin who know more about the priorsense project.

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Hi, thanks for reaching out. We would be happy to review your notebook/proposal. The weekly timeline does not need to have a lot of detail. You can share a draft, and we can iterate over it.

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