bkmrhat vs MachineShop

MachineShop provides a unified interface over a wide set of R model packages, handling fitting, resampling, performance metrics and variable importance behind one API. Recent releases are narrow and mostly corrective: 3.9.2 removed dead documentation links and fixed a Java parameter in a BART example, 3.9.1 ensured global settings reach compute nodes when varimp() runs in parallel and patched XGBoost model compatibility. The last release with real surface change was 3.9.0, which added offset support to XGBModel and a pool argument to calibration() controlling whether calibration curves are computed on pooled predictions or averaged across resampling iterations.

Development has concentrated on variable importance and resampling rather than on adding models. 3.8.0 restructured the VariableImportance class to record which method and metric produced it, with an update() method to migrate objects from earlier versions, and extended term-specific p-values to Cox, POLR and survival regression models. 3.7.0 added grouped and stratified resampling to the control objects. The pace has slowed markedly - four releases in the last two years against six in the two before - and the recent content is compatibility work against XGBoost, parsnip, ggplot2 and recipes.

Expect the deprecated calibration pooling behaviour to be removed in a future release as the notes state, with the intervening versions continuing to track upstream model package changes.