rjdqa
rjdqa keeps refining one screen: the seasonal adjustment quality dashboard
A side-by-side editorial comparison of aedseo and bittermelon — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
An epidemic-onset detector that now brackets the whole season, not just its start
aedseo is a Statens Serum Institut R package for automated early detection of seasonal epidemic onsets, built around growth-rate estimation over consecutive time intervals. The 1.0.0 line moved it well past its original scope: observations are now modelled as cases or population-adjusted incidence, multiple waves can be estimated in one pass, and disease-specific thresholds are computed by a dedicated function. Version 1.1.0 adds an estimate of when a season has ended after the first onset.
bittermelon is growing from binary bitmaps toward greyscale and color glyphs
The package manipulates bitmap fonts and bitmaps in R, and the recent direction is widening what a glyph can be. v2.3.1 adds greyscale font support by reading the experimental yaff levels property into pixmap glyphs with alpha derived from the level fraction, and makes writing a multi-colored glyph an error rather than silently clamping it. Earlier releases built out the same surface: bm_extract(), an interactive pixel picker, data frame coercion, and format support for other packages' bitmap types.
aedseo is a Statens Serum Institut R package for automated early detection of seasonal epidemic onsets, built around growth-rate estimation over consecutive time intervals. The 1.0.0 line moved it well past its original scope: observations are now modelled as cases or population-adjusted incidence, multiple waves can be estimated in one pass, and disease-specific thresholds are computed by a dedicated function. Version 1.1.0 adds an estimate of when a season has ended after the first onset.
The arc runs from a single-purpose onset detector toward a full seasonal-surveillance toolkit. Each release since 1.0.0 has widened what the package can say about a season rather than improving how it says it: incidence denominators, background population, multi-wave detection, thresholds, and now season end. Fixes in between are narrow and numerical, such as confidence intervals under ATLAS BLAS.
The natural next step is symmetry with the onset machinery the package already has: turning the 1.1.0 seasonal offset into a first-class output alongside onset, with its own summary and plotting methods.
The package manipulates bitmap fonts and bitmaps in R, and the recent direction is widening what a glyph can be. v2.3.1 adds greyscale font support by reading the experimental yaff levels property into pixmap glyphs with alpha derived from the level fraction, and makes writing a multi-colored glyph an error rather than silently clamping it. Earlier releases built out the same surface: bm_extract(), an interactive pixel picker, data frame coercion, and format support for other packages' bitmap types.
Two things are converging. The representation is moving beyond one-bit glyphs — pixmaps, color, and now greyscale levels with transparency — while the API gets stricter about the boundary between them, refusing to quietly downcast a color glyph on write. Separately, the package has been shedding weight: the embedded monobit copy was removed once it outgrew CRAN size limits, pushing format breadth onto a user-installed dependency.
Expect further greyscale and color work now that levels parsing exists — most likely writing that format rather than only reading it, since the write path is where the current release chose to draw a hard error instead.
Other Analytics 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 aedseo or bittermelon.
rjdqa keeps refining one screen: the seasonal adjustment quality dashboard
epikit narrows to field-epidemiology helpers, handing proportions to a sibling package
SimInf 10.0 turns an epidemic simulator into a tool that fits models to real time series
A young package porting Stata's egen row-wise helpers to the tidyverse, one function per release
A statistician's personal toolbox, growing one plotting utility at a time
R/qtl is in pure custodial mode: every recent release answers a compiler, not a user
See all aedseo alternatives → · See all bittermelon alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. aedseo and bittermelon 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. aedseo and bittermelon 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 Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top aedseo alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "aedseo alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/aedseo-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top bittermelon alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "bittermelon alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/bittermelon-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.