stan-playground
A tour of Stan Playground
For users familiar with tools like the Compiler Explorer, repl.it or JSFiddle, Stan Playground hopes to provide a similar experience for Stan models.
1: Stan Editor
The site features an editor for Stan code with syntax highlighting, automatic formatting, and warnings and errors from the Stan compiler for instant feedback.
2: Preparing Data
Data can be provided in JSON format in its own editor, or can be generated from code written in R (using webR) or Python (using pyodide), including code that imports published datasets from the web or from files added in the “additional files” tab.
(with this the scripts can access
park.csv. E.g., data.R could call read.csv("park.csv") and use that to produce data.json)
3: Compiling and Running
Compilation of the models is the only part of Stan Playground which is not run locally. We provide a public server for convenience, but you can also host your own. This is controlled in settings (see section 6 below).
After a model has been compiled, sampling can be run entirely in your local browser.
4: Viewing and analyzing results
Stan Playground has several built-in ways of viewing the samples, but also supports performing your own analysis, again in R or Python.
5: Sharing and saving your data
Stan Playground has built-in sharing features to allow you to download a copy of your project, upload an existing project, or share via a Github Gist. Quick share and sharing with a Gist provides a link you can send to other users–when clicked, the link loads your shared project in the recipient’s browser. Quick sharing may not work for very large projects, as all the necessary information is stored in the URL, and these can get quite long.
You can also prepare custom links if you have files already living at some URL (e.g., they are already in a github repository). For example, this link will load the “golf” case study from the Stan example models repository:
6: Settings
The settings window allows you to control the compilation server used and some other user-settings, including a dark mode.