2023-04-12 developer team meeting minutes

[wlandau]

• Participants: Kevin Kunzmann, Christian Stock, Yoni Sidi, Andrew Bean, Daniel Leibovitz, Will Landau
• Progress on brms.mmrm up to 90d5534.
• Yoni: re compilation (Compilation #6), mrSolve compiles models and has ways of managing them for parallel workers.
• Will: likewise with CmdStan.
• Kevin: +1 to use brms backend for now, then maybe switch to 1 or 2 pre-complied Stan models when we are more certain about scope.
• Kevin and Christian to look for application examples, e.g. historical borrowing.
• Christian: value in looking at the easier informative prior model first. May want to consider a more complicated meta-analytic model and assess feasibility.
• Will: if we add an informative prior model on top of the existing non-informative prior model, we may need to restrict the parameterization so the interpretation of the prior matches the interpretation of the parameters.
• Kevin: a functional uniform prior may be a way to specify a prior in an intuitive way and then translate it automatically to the correct parameterization in the backend.
• Kevin: could explore the connection between MMRM and Gaussian process regression.
• Will to implement postprocessing functionality ahead of the next meeting on 2023-04-26.