TidyDensity
A distribution catalogue that grows by one family at a time, and rarely breaks anything.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of aniread and GeneNMF — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
aniread keeps finding that every tracker lies about coordinates in its own way.
aniread is the reader package of the animovement suite, importing output from pose-estimation and centroid trackers into aniframe objects. The 0.4.0 release standardised something every reader had been getting differently — source data using an image top-left origin is now reflected into a conventional bottom-left origin, across eleven readers. Since then the work has been Octron and BORIS specifics, and 0.5.0 extended the package past tracking data into behavioural events.
GeneNMF rebuilt how it derives meta-programs, changing every result it had produced.
GeneNMF applies non-negative matrix factorization to single-cell expression data to find gene programs, then consolidates programs recurring across samples into meta-programs. Version 0.6.0 replaced the consolidation method: instead of reducing each program to a gene set and taking a consensus, it retains full gene weight vectors and compares them by cosine similarity. Later releases have built reporting and control around that core — a metaprogram composition matrix showing which samples contributed, custom signature databases for enrichment testing, and the ability to drop meta-programs from results.
aniread is the reader package of the animovement suite, importing output from pose-estimation and centroid trackers into aniframe objects. The 0.4.0 release standardised something every reader had been getting differently — source data using an image top-left origin is now reflected into a conventional bottom-left origin, across eleven readers. Since then the work has been Octron and BORIS specifics, and 0.5.0 extended the package past tracking data into behavioural events.
Each release reads as a catalogue of the ways a source format is imprecise: Octron omitting frames where nothing was detected, BORIS exports whose image index puts a STOP before its START, idtracker.ai renaming its leading column, Windows UNC shares reporting a false negative on read permission. The fixes share a posture of reconstructing what the format left implicit rather than passing the gap through — reinstating missing frames as all-NA rows, recovering a frame interval from time and FPS. Format support now tracks aniframe's class work closely, with 0.5.0 requiring aniframe 0.6.0 for the anievent class it produces.
get_supported_sources() was added so downstream packages can discover formats programmatically instead of hard-coding them, which suggests the next additions are more sources behind that registry rather than changes to the reader API.
GeneNMF applies non-negative matrix factorization to single-cell expression data to find gene programs, then consolidates programs recurring across samples into meta-programs. Version 0.6.0 replaced the consolidation method: instead of reducing each program to a gene set and taking a consensus, it retains full gene weight vectors and compares them by cosine similarity. Later releases have built reporting and control around that core — a metaprogram composition matrix showing which samples contributed, custom signature databases for enrichment testing, and the ability to drop meta-programs from results.
The package is moving from producing meta-programs to letting users interrogate and constrain how they were formed. Composition matrices, the drop function and downsampled similarity heatmaps all serve inspection rather than derivation. The parameters added alongside the 0.6.0 rewrite — specificity weighting, cumulative weight thresholds, confidence defined as the fraction of programs containing a gene — turn what were fixed internal choices into stated, tunable ones.
Recent releases have been fixes and compatibility work rather than method changes, so the core approach appears settled. The dependency on an RcppML version not on CRAN is the loose end most likely to force the next release.
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 aniread or GeneNMF.
A distribution catalogue that grows by one family at a time, and rarely breaks anything.
College football's open data client hit v2 — and now reports how many API calls you have left.
The USA phenology data client rebuilt its entire stack and stopped handing users -9999 as a number.
Publication-ready psychology tables and plots, tracking APA style as closely as the software allows.
A spatial-statistics utility package exists to be depended on, and is built accordingly.
The area-proportional Euler diagram package is finished software, and maintained like it.
See all aniread alternatives → · See all GeneNMF alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. aniread and GeneNMF 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. aniread and GeneNMF 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 aniread alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "aniread alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/aniread for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top GeneNMF alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "GeneNMF alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/genenmf for the full list with editorial commentary on each.