- Stan is a turing complete, probabilistic programming language that is used mostly for Bayesian inference
- Stan is a two stage compiler: you write your model in the Stan language, which is translated into C++ and then compiled to the native platform
- Stan includes a matrix and math library that supports auto-differentiation
- Stan includes interfaces to R and other languages
- There are post-inference plotting libraries that can be used with Stan like
bayesplot1
- Stan has thousands of users and growing. Stan is used in clinical drug trials, genomics and cancer biology, population dynamics, psycholinguistics, social networks, finance and econometrics, professional sports, publishing, recommender systems, educational testing, climate models, and many more
- There companies that are building commercial products on top of Stan