mice
mice can finally predict, not just estimate, from multiply imputed data.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of ggfootball and serocalculator — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
A football-viz package just swapped scraping for an API and broke its own output to do it.
ggfootball is a small R package for plotting expected-goals and shot data, sourced from Understat. Four releases are visible. The 0.2.x line was argument tidying and dependency pruning; 0.3.0 replaced the data-acquisition layer wholesale, moving get_match_shots() from HTML parsing onto Understat's AJAX endpoints and changing the returned column names in the process.
A seroincidence engine grows up: whole API renamed, then clustered survey designs
serocalculator turns cross-sectional antibody measurements into infection-rate estimates, and it spent its last two releases making itself safe to depend on. Version 1.4.0 renamed nearly every user-facing function into a consistent est_seroincidence()/sr_params vocabulary; 1.4.1 shipped the migration crosswalk that admits how much that broke. The newest capability is cluster-robust variance estimation for household- and school-based surveys.
ggfootball is a small R package for plotting expected-goals and shot data, sourced from Understat. Four releases are visible. The 0.2.x line was argument tidying and dependency pruning; 0.3.0 replaced the data-acquisition layer wholesale, moving get_match_shots() from HTML parsing onto Understat's AJAX endpoints and changing the returned column names in the process.
The direction is away from scraped HTML and toward a thinner, more defensible package: four dependencies dropped in 0.3.0 on top of qdapRegex in 0.2.1, input validation added, error messages rewritten. Both breaking changes so far were accepted rather than deferred, which reads as a maintainer treating pre-1.0 as the window to get the shape right. The package is willing to break callers for structural reasons, not cosmetic ones.
With the scraper rebuilt and the dependency surface trimmed, the next releases are likely to stabilise the new column names and extend the plotting side, which has seen nothing since 0.2.0. A 1.0 would be the signal that the data structure is now considered fixed.
serocalculator turns cross-sectional antibody measurements into infection-rate estimates, and it spent its last two releases making itself safe to depend on. Version 1.4.0 renamed nearly every user-facing function into a consistent est_seroincidence()/sr_params vocabulary; 1.4.1 shipped the migration crosswalk that admits how much that broke. The newest capability is cluster-robust variance estimation for household- and school-based surveys.
The arc runs from method to instrument. Early releases added example data and plotting; recent ones fix the API surface, satisfy CRAN's offline-failure policy, and extend the estimator to sampling designs field epidemiology actually uses — multi-level clustering, stratification, and the two combined. Each release also carries visible refactoring discipline (one function per file, linting, per-PR website previews) that reads like a package preparing for contributors it does not have yet.
With cluster_var and stratum_var now threaded through both est_seroincidence() and est_seroincidence_by(), survey weights are the remaining piece of a complex-survey design the sandwich estimator does not cover. The entries do not name it, so read that as direction rather than a promise.
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either ggfootball or serocalculator.
mice can finally predict, not just estimate, from multiply imputed data.
A market-microstructure toolkit that keeps adding estimators as the papers land.
A vowel-analysis package trimming dependencies after an email address got it archived.
The R half of the EMU speech database system, fixing what was quietly broken.
A Bayesian model-averaging package spending its 2.0 on memory, not methods.
tidyplots keeps rebuilding its own foundations rather than layering around them.
See all ggfootball alternatives → · See all serocalculator alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. ggfootball and serocalculator are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ggfootball and serocalculator are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
Top ggfootball alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggfootball alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggfootball for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top serocalculator alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "serocalculator alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/serocalculator for the full list with editorial commentary on each.