Maintaining MatlabStan?

Developers
#1

every few months we get a question re MatlabStan - afaik, it’s not being actively maintained.

MatlabStan is a very light wrapper around CmdStan. I don’t know matlab, but as wrappers go, this one is beautiful in its simplicity. my guess is that the problem is here:

so if we have any matlab fans - this bit of code needs to be updated. information about using the CmdStan makefile to compile a model is here: https://mc-stan.org/docs/2_24/cmdstan-guide/compiling-a-stan-program.html#invoking-the-make-utility

@brian-lau - could you comment? are you interested in keeping this project going or helping someone who could?

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#2

I’m curious about what made you select this particular issue :) There are 24 open on github issues that need addressing. It is excellent software, but there hasn’t been a release since May 2017. It hasn’t kept up with changes in cmdstan.

The problem with the code you posted is similar to one of the open issues: https://github.com/brian-lau/MatlabStan/issues/57. It mentions how to fix it. This issue also mentions an issue with pulling the version of cmdstan after 2.22.0, which breaks MatlabStan across systems.

It seems that it would be a straightforward fix using ispc to determine whether the user is running Windows. It seems this is a problem elsewhere in the MatlabStan code based on the issue referenced above. I don’t know if this fixes the problem you’re referencing though, because I run MatlabStan on a mac.

I can help address some of the open issues on github to keep it running. (as long as I can do so on mac for the time being) I don’t know if many others out there use MatlabStan though. I only use it for particular things, but I do most other Stan modeling in R .

How can I help? I’m MATLAB savvy but not stan savvy :) I would like to ensure that MatlabStan continues to be maintained, so I’m happy to help.

(also, https://mc-stan.org/docs/2_24/cmdstan-guide/compiling-a-stan-program.html#invoking-the-make-utility says that Mac and Linux use the backslash, but the example given uses forward slashes)

> make examples/bernoulli/bernoulli
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#3

in the past few weeks there were two user queries regarding MatlabStan - as I’m very involved in both CmdStan and wrapper interfaces CmdStanPy and CmdStanR, things that touch CmdStan are on my radar. so just a response to recent posts on discourse, that’s all.

that would be awesome. I’m stan savvy but not Matlab savvy, so happy to work together.

and many thanks for catching errors in the CmdStan docs.

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