Making priors stored in baggr objects more understandable to the users

[johanna-einsiedler]

This is more of a question than a request:

I was unable to find an explanation of the parameters of fitted baggr models.
e.g. there is the parameter 'formated_prior' which has an attribute 'prior_hypermean_fam' which is 1 in the default. However, I wasn't able to find out what 1 means in this case or what the values of 'priof_hypermean_val' stand for.

Sorry in case I overlooked something. Would be great if you could point me in the right direction.

Thanks a lot and big kudos for building this package!

[wwiecek]

Thanks for asking! These formatted priors are simply translations of either the user-specified or manually assigned priors into Stan syntax. So they are not fitted parameters, they are obtained before Stan is ran. I store them in baggr object so that there is a clear record of what prior was.
You can see how they are used in this Stan file:

https://github.com/wwiecek/baggr/blob/master/inst/stan/functions/prior_increment.stan

Baiscally, _fam controls what family of distributions is used, and then _val or _value is fed in. The function I linked evaluates (probability density of) the prior

If you let me know more about your use case, I can make sure this is presented/documented a bit better. I have some unfinished functions for printing out priors.