stan-dev / stan-dev/rstanarm

Require 'data' argument?

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#155 9 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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question
Dominant language
R
Stars
401
Forks
136
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

I'm strongly in favor of this. Here are pros/cons:

Reason to require the data argument:
  • Not requiring the data argument when specifying a model leads to all sorts of challenges for successfully implementing and maintaining the internals of rstanarm (or any other modeling package really).
Reasons not to require the data argument:
  • Base R's lm/glm and lme4's lmer/glmer set a very unfortunate precedent of not requiring this so we would be breaking with tradition if we were to require it.
  • @andrewgelman seems to like using the global environment but maybe we can convince him that the convenience is not worth the problems it introduces

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the discussion in issue #155, which weighs requiring the data argument against existing R modeling conventions. No files, tests, or implementation entry points are named; done would require an agreed behavior, implementation scope, and corresponding validation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
r
Domain
machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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