nabla
nabla dropped its C++ engine to chase exact derivatives at any order.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of compositional.mle and tidycmprsk — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
An MLE package rebuilt around composable solvers, then renamed to match.
compositional.mle performs numerical maximum likelihood estimation in R, with the optimisation strategy expressed as composed pieces rather than configured up front. It began in November 2025 as numerical.mle, a configuration-object package with fixed solvers. The v0.2.0 rewrite replaced that with solver factories sharing a uniform signature and operators for chaining and racing them, and renamed the package accordingly. The two most recent releases are CRAN submission work.
Competing-risks modelling that now moves only when its neighbours do.
tidycmprsk wraps competing risks regression and cumulative incidence estimation in tidy-style output, so results slot into gtsummary tables and ggsurvfit plots. The last two releases are small: 1.1.2 sorts tidy.tidycuminc() output by stratum, 1.1.1 is an HTML5 documentation update for CRAN. The substantive work in the window is 1.1.0, which reorganised the gtsummary relationship.
compositional.mle performs numerical maximum likelihood estimation in R, with the optimisation strategy expressed as composed pieces rather than configured up front. It began in November 2025 as numerical.mle, a configuration-object package with fixed solvers. The v0.2.0 rewrite replaced that with solver factories sharing a uniform signature and operators for chaining and racing them, and renamed the package accordingly. The two most recent releases are CRAN submission work.
The arc is a design idea overtaking an implementation: version 0.1.0 exposed configuration functions and named solvers, version 0.2.0 turned solvers into values that can be sequenced with %>>%, raced with %|%, restarted, or conditionally refined, and separated the statistical problem from the optimisation strategy. Since then all effort has gone into CRAN acceptance, dead code removal, policy compliance, validation fixes. That is a package that redesigned itself early and is now trying to get through the door.
With the composable API settled, the next work will most likely be additional solvers and transformers plugged into the existing operators rather than another redesign.
tidycmprsk wraps competing risks regression and cumulative incidence estimation in tidy-style output, so results slot into gtsummary tables and ggsurvfit plots. The last two releases are small: 1.1.2 sorts tidy.tidycuminc() output by stratum, 1.1.1 is an HTML5 documentation update for CRAN. The substantive work in the window is 1.1.0, which reorganised the gtsummary relationship.
The package has spent its releases handing responsibilities to neighbouring packages rather than growing its own surface. Plotting was deprecated then made defunct in favour of ggsurvfit::ggcuminc(), and 1.1.0 moved the regression table methods so that gtsummary could drop tidycmprsk as a dependency. What remains is the estimation core plus the S3 methods that let other packages consume it, which is a deliberate narrowing.
Expect releases to continue tracking changes in gtsummary and the broader tidy survival stack rather than adding estimation features.
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 compositional.mle or tidycmprsk.
nabla dropped its C++ engine to chase exact derivatives at any order.
Eight months from first release to keyring caching and workload identity.
A research-project workflow package where the interesting work is in the plumbing.
A cyclomatic complexity checker that ships once every couple of years, and lands when it does.
Extreme value sampling in pure upkeep mode, mostly answering to Rcpp and CRAN.
A package retired in 2017 just got rewritten against R's public C API.
See all compositional.mle alternatives → · See all tidycmprsk alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. compositional.mle and tidycmprsk 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. compositional.mle and tidycmprsk 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 compositional.mle alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "compositional.mle alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/compositional-mle for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top tidycmprsk alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "tidycmprsk alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/tidycmprsk for the full list with editorial commentary on each.