mice
mice can finally predict, not just estimate, from multiply imputed data.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of samplr and standardlastprofile — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
A cognitive-science sampling package ships once, then goes quiet for eighteen months
samplr compares human performance against sampling algorithms, giving cognitive scientists the MCMC machinery to test whether people behave like samplers. Its entire public history is three releases: a 1.0.0 in August 2024, a floating-point fix eighteen seconds later, and then nothing until a February 2026 patch. The release notes are unusually thin even by CRAN standards.
A German electricity load-profile package added gas and doubled the market it serves.
standardlastprofile implements the BDEW standard load profiles that German utilities use to assign consumption to customers without interval metering. Until June it did electricity only. Version 2.0.0 added the gas side — the SigLinDe synthetic procedure across all 15 BDEW gas profile IDs — and gave electricity a new primary interface, slp_electricity(), with slp_generate() superseded but retained.
samplr compares human performance against sampling algorithms, giving cognitive scientists the MCMC machinery to test whether people behave like samplers. Its entire public history is three releases: a 1.0.0 in August 2024, a floating-point fix eighteen seconds later, and then nothing until a February 2026 patch. The release notes are unusually thin even by CRAN standards.
The feed shows a package that shipped and stopped. The 2024 tags were both created in one sitting and say almost nothing; the 2026 release is a row-count bug in Mean_Variance() bundled with citation metadata, a dropped dependency and http-to-https link fixes — the housekeeping profile of a package being kept alive for the paper that cites it rather than actively developed.
Adding citation information to the README is usually the move of a maintainer expecting the package to be referenced rather than extended. On this cadence the next release is more likely another CRAN-hygiene patch than new algorithms; there is not enough in these notes to say otherwise.
standardlastprofile implements the BDEW standard load profiles that German utilities use to assign consumption to customers without interval metering. Until June it did electricity only. Version 2.0.0 added the gas side — the SigLinDe synthetic procedure across all 15 BDEW gas profile IDs — and gave electricity a new primary interface, slp_electricity(), with slp_generate() superseded but retained.
The package is converting from a dataset wrapper into a calculation library. Electricity profiles are tabulated values the package ships; gas profiles are computed from daily temperatures and a customer value through a coefficient-driven function, and the maintainer exposed the whole ladder — slp_gas() for the profile, slp_gas_kundenwert() to derive the customer value from a reference year, slp_gas_siglinde() for the raw h(theta) demand function so users can supply state-level coefficients, and coefficient and weekday-factor accessors underneath. The same instinct removed the built-in holiday table in favour of computing Easter directly, which lifted the date range cap from 2073 to open-ended. Deprecations are handled carefully throughout: renames keep working with lifecycle warnings, and the one hard break was already a warning since 1.1.0.
slp_gas_siglinde() was exported specifically so users could plug in region-specific coefficients such as Baden-Wurttemberg's, which points at state-level coefficient sets as the next thing to ship rather than leave to callers. The BDEW reference edition is now pinned to an Internet Archive permalink after the last one 404'd, so tracking edition changes is an ongoing maintenance cost.
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 samplr or standardlastprofile.
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 samplr alternatives → · See all standardlastprofile alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. samplr and standardlastprofile 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. samplr and standardlastprofile 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 samplr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "samplr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/samplr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top standardlastprofile alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "standardlastprofile alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/standardlastprofile for the full list with editorial commentary on each.