A copula is a multivariate model whose marginals are uniform. A copula based model is one that is based on a copula. The attraction of using copula models is that we can separately model the marginal distributions and the dependence structure of our target distribution. Such models are particularly attractive when some or all of the marginals are discrete or a mixture of discrete and continuous components. A multivariate probit model is one simple example of a copula model.
