October 25, 2012
Stan 1.0.3 Released
The Stan Development Team is happy to announce the
availability of Stan and RStan versions 1.0.3. See:
http://mc-stan.org/
Stan now supports lower and upper bounds in vector and
matrix declarations and vectorization of all univariate
continuous probability functions.
RStan now supports running chains in multiple processes
and merging the results.
We've also fixed some bugs and hopefully made user error
messages more comprehensible.
The important issues dealt with in the release are as follows.
v 1.0.3 Release Notes (25 Oct 2012)
======================================================================
Stan Bug Fixes:
-- error output in stanc now directed to standard error
-- catching all exceptions thrown in stanc to prevent core dumps
-- parser now accepts variable names starting with "int" and "real"
in first assignment after declaration
-- now catching unknown truncation cdfs and vectorizations in stanc
-- (hopefully) less scary message for domain error rejects
-- removed use of assert(); replaced with exceptions where
appropriate
-- fixed boundary condition on reporting max init retry failures
-- fixed initialization errors in tests that failed on some platforms
-- improved error checking for matrix size args to prevent segfaults
-- fixed boundary condition on bounded transform to allow
beta(0.8,0.8) samples near 0 or 1
Stan New Features:
-- mdivide_left_tri_low, mdivide_right_tri_low functions
-- all univariate continuous densities vectorized
-- better error checking for transforms
-- new error return type in stanc for invalid arguments
-- lower and upper bounds for vectors, row vectors, and matrices
-- command parameter refresh <= 0 turns off iteration reporting
-- int divisions produce warnings in stanc
-- errors caused by invalid transformed parameters include var name
-- various efficiency improvements and error handling for boundary
conditions and special cases of probability functions
-- simplified matrix code with heavier use of templating
Stan Manual Additions:
-- example of defining new distribution with parameters
-- diff report vs. previous versions
-- updated for range constraints on vector, row vector, matrix
-- updated Eigen licensing information (now MPL, was LGPL)
-- fixed alpha ordering issue in function index due to bolding
RStan Bug Fixes:
-- bug of setting parameter epsilon_pm wrongly for NUTS
-- fixed seed reset so results match Stan
RStan New Features:
-- return empty stanfit object upon error such as incorrect data
input, wrong argument specification, etc. Previously, it will
stop. The empty stanfit includes the compiled model, so it can be
reused.
-- add function stan_demo() to run examples included in Stan.
-- add function sflist2stanfit() to merge a list of stanfit objects
into one, to facilitate user-level parallelism.
-- add S3 method as.matrix, as.array, is.array, dim,
dimnames for stanfit objects.
-- specify seed using string of digits in addition to numbers
-- turn off refresh if value <= 0
======================================================================
As usual, let us know on the users list or on our issue tracker
if there are problems.
--- Stan Development Team