MetaboAnalystR
The R engine behind MetaboAnalyst closes the gap from raw spectra to biological interpretation
A side-by-side editorial comparison of cIRT and r2dii.analysis — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
A choice-based IRT model published once in 2019 and kept compiling ever since
cIRT implements Choice Item Response Theory, jointly modelling which item a respondent picks and how they perform on it — the setting where subjects choose between a harder and an easier question and the choice itself carries information. It comes out of the TMSA Lab, is built on Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, and has had one substantive release since reaching CRAN. Everything after early 2019 is build-system and toolchain upkeep.
The climate-alignment maths behind PACTA, now stable and maintained rather than reshaped
r2dii.analysis computes the target-setting side of PACTA: market-share and sectoral decarbonisation targets that measure a loan book or portfolio against climate scenarios. It sits downstream of the matched company data the sibling packages produce. The 0.5.0 release declared it lifecycle-stable and handed maintenance to a new lead, and releases since have been narrow corrections rather than new methods.
cIRT implements Choice Item Response Theory, jointly modelling which item a respondent picks and how they perform on it — the setting where subjects choose between a harder and an easier question and the choice itself carries information. It comes out of the TMSA Lab, is built on Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, and has had one substantive release since reaching CRAN. Everything after early 2019 is build-system and toolchain upkeep.
The package's whole functional history fits in a two-day window in January 2019, when the CRAN release and its immediate follow-ups were tagged in one batch, followed a day later by a release enabling C++11 and OpenMP and fixing the choice generation procedure. Since then the releases track other people's deprecations: Armadillo dropping conversions, RcppArmadillo requiring a different Makevars, R raising its floor. The 2025 release is entirely of that kind, down to swapping the README to Quarto.
The dependency floors were just raised to current Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, so the next release is most likely the one after Armadillo deprecates something else.
r2dii.analysis computes the target-setting side of PACTA: market-share and sectoral decarbonisation targets that measure a loan book or portfolio against climate scenarios. It sits downstream of the matched company data the sibling packages produce. The 0.5.0 release declared it lifecycle-stable and handed maintenance to a new lead, and releases since have been narrow corrections rather than new methods.
The history is a package converging. Early releases churn the output contract of target_market_share() and target_sda() — which sectors appear, which years, how missing production is treated — and each change alters the numbers users get. The ald-to-abcd rename runs across several releases before completing, and by 0.5.0 the churn has stopped, with three older summarise functions soft-deprecated and the package marked stable. What remains is edge-case correctness in target coverage.
With the package marked stable and the terminology migration finished, the soft-deprecated summarise functions are the obvious next thing to remove outright.
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 cIRT or r2dii.analysis.
The R engine behind MetaboAnalyst closes the gap from raw spectra to biological interpretation
Rebuilding SAS's formatting layer in R, one format specification at a time
Standardised coefficients for models where standardising everything is wrong — but the feed only links out
Stream-network spatial models learning to run on data that no longer fits in memory
Bioconductor's installer, frozen at 1.30.x and tuned almost entirely through environment variables
Decision curve analysis, settled since 2022 and now moving only when its neighbours do
See all cIRT alternatives → · See all r2dii.analysis alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. cIRT and r2dii.analysis 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. cIRT and r2dii.analysis 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 cIRT alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "cIRT alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/cirt for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top r2dii.analysis alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "r2dii.analysis alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/r2dii-analysis for the full list with editorial commentary on each.