On the call, I asked if we could employ the tidymodels approach where the community has developed guidelines for developing models.
I think this is a really great point, and I completely agree with your assessment that taking the time now to streamline these would have a huge impact going forward. As someone relatively new to this, I would say it would also be really helpful because it would remove some of these decisions about interface/formatting inputs and outputs that we face as developers.
Just so I make sure I understand what you’re suggesting, would the idea be that we as a relatively small community building tools aimed at solving similar problems and producing similar types of outputs, would coalesce on say standardized ways of doing things like: specifying priors, specifying delay distributions, specifying input data, and formatting of outputs (e.g. the main wrapper function would return the same set of elements, with similar looking tooling downstream to extract posterior draws/join with data/run diagnostics/score results)?
I think this would be fantastic. I am still in the process of making some of these decisions for the package I am building and had a discussion with @seabbs Tuesday on the best way to streamline the outputs so that for example an entirely different model could still return the same elements, and just have different post-processing to extract different variables.