Mamba.jl inclusion in julia-stats (was: Re: [julia-stats] Statistics roadmap post)

[Kevin Squire]

Hi Benjamin (and everyone else),

Not speaking on behalf of JuliaStats, but the standard way of having a discussion about getting a package included there would be to open an issue at

   https://github.com/JuliaStats/Roadmap.jl/issues

Cheers,

   Kevin

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 4:09 PM, Lars Tonkard <lton...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think its the lack of autodiff which is an extension of a difference in philosophy of use. 

On Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 3:39:20 PM UTC-5, Rob J Goedman wrote:

I fully support Benjamin’s email (with respect to Stan.jl vs. Mamba.jl).

Mamba.jl should be part of JuliaStats in my opinion.

Regards,

Rob

On Jan 16, 2016, at 10:16, Benjamin Deonovic <bdeo...@gmail.com> wrote:

 Complementing the above work, we intend to support a more flexible choice of algorithms, such as QR, Cholesky, stochastic gradient descent, MCMC techniques (for example via Lora.jl or Stan.jl), and variational methods for Bayesian models.

Just want to point out that Mamba.jl is a much more mature MCMC package in julia. Lora.jl has just recently gone through a major revamp and is still in heavy development, doesn't have any convergence diagnostics, or plotting features, and master branch only contains a few samplers (devel branch has several more). Stan.jl requires user to have Stan installed, so I don't think that would be an appropriate addition to GLM.jl, also Stan.jl utilizes Mamba for convergence diagnostics and plotting. 

This isn't a slight against Lora.jl or Stan.jl. Theodore Papamarkou is doing a great job with Lora.jl and Rob Goedman's port of Stan to julia is fantastic. I just wish Mamba got a bit more traffic than it does. Of course having several packages that do the same thing is not a bad thing. It can encourage innovation and development. It does seem a bit unfair that Lora.jl gets to be featured in JuliaStats. 

[Benjamin Deonovic]

Thanks Kevin we will look into it. 

[Benjamin Deonovic]

What is involved in putting a package into JuliaStats? Who has administrative privileges?