cmdstan-rs: Rust interface for CmdStan

Suppose that you write Rust code. Suppose that you use Stan for probabilistic programming. You have two choices for creating an application which utilizes both: shell scripts, or, a Rust interface for CmdStan. This crate enables the latter.

At present, this crate enables the user to compile Stan programs, run CmdStan tools (diagnose, stansummary), and run any analysis method supported by Stan. In particular, for the analysis methods, the full flavor of arguments is provided, commensurate with builders which supply defaults to all values the user does not wish to bother with.

See the examples for illustration.

Future work

• serialization of data; serde_json is the obvious choice for handling JSON, but some thought is necessary in order to present in a coherent interface which accommodates Stan data types while being idiomatic in Rust.
• deserialization of Stan CSV format; this is probably within the scope of this crate, albeit, to be strongly typed and handle arbitrary Stan data types, we will likely need force the user to provide a type which implements Deserialize.

Disclaimer

This crate is not affiliated with the Stan project.