<a href="http://mc-stan.org">
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stan-dev/logos/master/logo.png" width=200 alt="Stan Logo"/>
</a>

<b>Stan</b> is a C++ package providing

* full Bayesian inference using the No-U-Turn sampler (NUTS), a variant of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC),
* approximate Bayesian inference using automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI), and
* penalized maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) using L-BFGS optimization.

It is built on top of the [Stan Math library](https://github.com/stan-dev/math), which provides

* a full first- and higher-order automatic differentiation library based on C++ template overloads, and
* a supporting fully-templated matrix, linear algebra, and probability special function library.

There are interfaces available in R, Python, MATLAB, Julia, Stata, Mathematica, and for the command line.

[![DOI](https://zenodo.org/badge/19868/stan-dev/stan.svg)](https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/19868/stan-dev/stan)

Home Page
---------
Stan's home page, with links to everything you'll need to use Stan is:

[http://mc-stan.org/](http://mc-stan.org/)

Interfaces
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There are separate repositories in the stan-dev GitHub organization for the interfaces, higher-level libraries and lower-level libraries.  

Source Repository
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Stan's source-code repository is hosted here on GitHub.

Licensing
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The Stan math library, core Stan code, and CmdStan are licensed under new BSD.   RStan and PyStan are licensed under GPLv3, with other interfaces having other open-source licenses.