stan usage/download statistics

[Alp Kucukelbir]

hi stan-dev,

i'm curious: do we have a central record (or statistical summary) of stan usage? e.g.: how many downloads to date, how many users, how many publications, etc.?

i'd like to use some of those numbers in my upcoming talks.

cheers
alp

[Ben Goodrich]

On Wednesday, November 11, 2015 at 8:57:03 AM UTC-5, Alp Kucukelbir wrote:

i'm curious: do we have a central record (or statistical summary) of stan usage? e.g.: how many downloads to date, how many users, how many publications, etc.?

i'd like to use some of those numbers in my upcoming talks.

I'm sure we could count up the number of publications, but I don't know it offhand. There are currently about 1400 people registered for stan-users. Downloads is pretty much unknowable because it is against CRAN policy to track downloads of rstan. The number of people who have forked one or more of the Stan-related repos on GitHub is becoming a good indicator of the amount of developer interest.

Ben

[Michael Betancourt]

In addition to the interfaces making it hard to infer downloads, GitHub itself

doesn’t supply much information so you have to piece a reasonable estimate

together from a bunch of disparate information.

From Github we have rolling estimates of clones and forks, 

https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/graphs/traffic, which puts us at about 40

unique clones every week (no idea which uses are cloning hundreds of

times!).  

Then there’s the API routes which gives us download stats for

our releases.  The best number there is probably the manual, in particular

the v2.8 manual has been downloaded over 5000 times (not necessarily

unique users).

Finally Pypi does provide download info at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pystan,

with almost 6000 PyStan downloads in the past month.

Oh, and the mc-stan.org website gets over 5000 unique users every few weeks,

50% of which are new.

Taking into account duplicate downloads and users who are just experimenting,

I think it’s safe to say that we have over 10,000 active users and I wouldn’t be

surprised if we’re closer to 50,000.

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[Alp Kucukelbir]

thanks ben and michael; genuinely amazing numbers! awesome!

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[Dustin Tran]

Wow, I’m surprised if we can even say 50,000 people have heard of Stan.

Dustin

[Andrew Gelman]

We were thinking of blowing our entire Sloan Foundation grant on a series of Super Bowl ads.  Then everyone will have heard of us!

[Dustin Tran]

+1 I’ll contribute negative dollars for this

Dustin