ggfootball
A football-viz package just swapped scraping for an API and broke its own output to do it.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
midr vs mpactr
A side-by-side editorial comparison of midr and mpactr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
midr vs mpactr: at a glance
What is midr?
A black-box interpreter reaches CRAN, then learns multi-class and survival responses
midr explains black-box models by fitting an interpretable surrogate through Maximum Interpretation Decomposition — main effects plus second-order interactions, with exact Shapley values for the surrogate. Two months after its first CRAN release it can take a matrix response, which covers multi-class classification and survival models, and hold collections of fitted interpretations in midlist and midrib objects for comparison.
What is mpactr?
mpactr spent two spring releases normalizing case in metadata after users kept tripping on it.
mpactr filters mass-spectrometry peak tables — removing contaminants, ion duplicates and low-reproducibility features before downstream metabolomics analysis — with a data.table and Rcpp core. Development is slow and the recent releases are small. The May pair both address the same friction: column names and imported table names arriving in inconsistent case and failing to match.
midr vs mpactr: editorial side-by-side
midr
0.0INFRA · APIS
A black-box interpreter reaches CRAN, then learns multi-class and survival responses
◆ Current state
midr explains black-box models by fitting an interpretable surrogate through Maximum Interpretation Decomposition — main effects plus second-order interactions, with exact Shapley values for the surrogate. Two months after its first CRAN release it can take a matrix response, which covers multi-class classification and survival models, and hold collections of fitted interpretations in midlist and midrib objects for comparison.
◆ Where it's heading
The releases move outward along two axes at once: what can be interpreted, and how much of it fits in memory. Version 0.5.3 rebuilt the fitting path to avoid materialising large design matrices and added a save.memory option; 0.6.0 widened the response from a vector to a matrix and added parametric link functions. Class and argument names were shortened in the same release, so the package is still willing to break itself this early.
◆ Prediction
With multiple models now held in one object and visualisation methods for them, comparison across models is the surface most likely to fill out next — the collection classes exist but the notes describe manipulation and plotting rather than any comparison metric.
mpactr
0.0INFRA · APIS
mpactr spent two spring releases normalizing case in metadata after users kept tripping on it.
◆ Current state
mpactr filters mass-spectrometry peak tables — removing contaminants, ion duplicates and low-reproducibility features before downstream metabolomics analysis — with a data.table and Rcpp core. Development is slow and the recent releases are small. The May pair both address the same friction: column names and imported table names arriving in inconsistent case and failing to match.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is stabilizing its input contract rather than growing its filtering methods. Metadata column names are now forced lowercase inside import_data() regardless of how the file was written, imported peak_tables names not present in the injection column are lowercased too, and get_meta_data() was renamed to get_metadata() in the same pass. Before that the work was infrastructural — Rcpp introduced to speed up filtering, data.table moved from Depends to Imports, and memory errors cleared so the package passes Valgrind and both sanitizers. Note the earliest entry compares against a v1.0.0 tag that precedes 0.1.0 in the repository, so version ordering in this feed is not reliable.
◆ Prediction
The case-normalization work has now touched both metadata columns and peak table names across two consecutive releases, which suggests the input-matching problem is not fully closed and a third pass is plausible. Nothing in these entries points to new filtering methods.
Alternatives to midr and mpactr
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 midr or mpactr.
goat
A gene-set enrichment package that outgrew its human-only origins, then went quiet.
rollupTree
The recursive-computation engine under massProps grows the accessors its consumer needed
massProps
A mass-properties rollup spends a year on documentation and follows its sibling's API
writeAlizer
Six months of releases and not one of them touched the scoring models
samplr
A cognitive-science sampling package ships once, then goes quiet for eighteen months
Recent activity from midr and mpactr
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 3mo agompactrPeak table names lowercased when absent from the injection column
- 3mo agompactrMetadata column names forced lowercase; get_metadata() renamed
- 5mo agomidrMatrix responses bring multi-class and survival models in scope ⚡
- 7mo agomidrFirst CRAN release: MID surrogate models for black-box explanation ⚡
- 7mo agomidrMemory-efficient fitting for large design matrices
- 10mo agompactrValgrind and sanitizer memory issues cleared
- 1y agompactrRcpp added to speed up filtering; data.table moved to Imports
- 1y agompactrmpactr 0.1.0
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between midr and mpactr?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. midr and mpactr 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.
Is midr better than mpactr?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. midr and mpactr 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.
What are the best alternatives to midr?
Top midr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "midr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/midr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to mpactr?
Top mpactr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mpactr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mpactr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.