simlandr
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
Comparison · Analytics
anyflights vs fastml
A side-by-side editorial comparison of anyflights and fastml — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
anyflights vs fastml: at a glance
What is anyflights?
A nycflights13 generator whose recent work is all about the data being right.
anyflights builds nycflights13-style datasets for any US airport and year, downloading flight, weather, airline, airport, and plane tables and optionally packaging them. The four visible releases span 2022 to 2025 and are dominated by keeping those downloads working. The most recent fixes a timezone leak and gaps in hourly weather data.
What is fastml?
fastml added survival modelling and leakage-proof resampling, moving past classification and regression.
A tidymodels-based AutoML wrapper that trains, tunes and compares many engines from one call. The 0.6.x line added engine-specific tuning parameters, class-imbalance handling, early stopping and DALEX-based explainability. The 0.7.5 release is far larger: a full survival analysis task with its own engines, MICE imputation and integrated Brier scoring, plus unbiased nested cross-validation, grouped, blocked and rolling resampling helpers, fold-wise imputation, recipe leakage checks, and a sandbox for user-supplied preprocessing.
anyflights vs fastml: editorial side-by-side
anyflights
0.0ANALYTICS
A nycflights13 generator whose recent work is all about the data being right.
◆ Current state
anyflights builds nycflights13-style datasets for any US airport and year, downloading flight, weather, airline, airport, and plane tables and optionally packaging them. The four visible releases span 2022 to 2025 and are dominated by keeping those downloads working. The most recent fixes a timezone leak and gaps in hourly weather data.
◆ Where it's heading
The function surface has been stable since 0.3; everything since concerns the fragility of the upstream sources. Broken URLs for airline data, download failures needing a session-timeout hint, planes data that stopped resolving, and weather values recorded only once an hour have each taken a release. Contributions come from teaching-adjacent users, which fits a package whose main use is generating course datasets.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next release to follow another upstream data-source change rather than to add a table or an argument.
fastml
0.0ANALYTICS
fastml added survival modelling and leakage-proof resampling, moving past classification and regression.
◆ Current state
A tidymodels-based AutoML wrapper that trains, tunes and compares many engines from one call. The 0.6.x line added engine-specific tuning parameters, class-imbalance handling, early stopping and DALEX-based explainability. The 0.7.5 release is far larger: a full survival analysis task with its own engines, MICE imputation and integrated Brier scoring, plus unbiased nested cross-validation, grouped, blocked and rolling resampling helpers, fold-wise imputation, recipe leakage checks, and a sandbox for user-supplied preprocessing.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is moving from convenience wrapper to something that has to be defensible statistically. Nested cross-validation, fold-wise rather than up-front imputation, and explicit leakage checks are all corrections to the shortcuts that make AutoML easy and its scores optimistic. Survival adds a third task type alongside classification and regression, and it arrived with its own metrics rather than being bolted onto the existing ones. Note the entry body is cut off at 8,000 characters, so the release is larger than what is shown.
◆ Prediction
Expect the remaining survival engines to fill in and the sandboxing of custom preprocessing to tighten, since both were still being iterated on within this same release's commit list.
Alternatives to anyflights and fastml
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 anyflights or fastml.
lavaanExtra
SEM reporting helpers converging on APA output, one CRAN resubmission at a time.
ibis.iSDM
A raster-to-terra migration is the only readable change in a feed of merge notes.
vinereg
Conditional density and log-likelihood fill out a vine copula regression package.
stringx
A drop-in string API for base R, kept alive by upstream check failures.
healthyR.data
From a bundled hospital dataset to a live CMS API client.
See all anyflights alternatives → · See all fastml alternatives →
Recent activity from anyflights and fastml
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 8mo agofastmlVersion 0.7.5 ⚡
- 1y agofastmlEngine-specific tuning, imbalance handling and explainability
- 1y agofastmlSingle-workflow evaluation fix
- 1y agofastmlVersion 0.5.0
- 1y agoanyflightsWeather output pinned to GMT and hourly gaps filled
- 2y agoanyflightsPlanes data downloads restored
- 4y agoanyflightsAirline data URLs fixed and CI moved to GitHub Actions
- 4y agoanyflightsProgress reporting and faster weather retrieval
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between anyflights and fastml?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. anyflights and fastml 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 anyflights better than fastml?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. anyflights and fastml 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.
What are the best alternatives to anyflights?
Top anyflights alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "anyflights alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/anyflights for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to fastml?
Top fastml alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "fastml alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/fastml for the full list with editorial commentary on each.