Traefik
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Comparison · Infra & APIs
crandep vs mdatools
A side-by-side editorial comparison of crandep and mdatools — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
crandep vs mdatools: at a glance
What is crandep?
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
What is mdatools?
mdatools spun out its cross-validation method, then came back for three-way data.
mdatools is a long-running chemometrics package covering PCA, PLS regression, SIMCA and DD-SIMCA classification, MCR resolution and a large spectral preprocessing framework. Its releases are infrequent and each one tends to carry one substantive idea plus a handful of fixes. The June release opens a direction the package had not previously taken: DD-SIMCA classification of three-way data, through PARAFAC and Tucker decompositions.
crandep vs mdatools: editorial side-by-side
crandep
0.0INFRA · APIS
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
◆ Current state
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
◆ Where it's heading
The modelling side has settled into a family of mixtures with matching wrapper and profile-posterior functions, and has not gained a new component since mid-2024. Attention has shifted to data quality in the scraper, where two consecutive releases dealt with the same class of problem: rows that should not exist because of trailing commas in CRAN's own metadata, and rows that should exist but did not because orphan packages have no edges. For a package whose science is degree distributions, missing isolated nodes is a modelling error, not a formatting one.
◆ Prediction
Expect further hardening against CRAN metadata quirks in the harvesting functions; the mixture-model side looks feature-complete and is likely to stay quiet unless a new component model is published.
mdatools
0.0INFRA · APIS
mdatools spun out its cross-validation method, then came back for three-way data.
◆ Current state
mdatools is a long-running chemometrics package covering PCA, PLS regression, SIMCA and DD-SIMCA classification, MCR resolution and a large spectral preprocessing framework. Its releases are infrequent and each one tends to carry one substantive idea plus a handful of fixes. The June release opens a direction the package had not previously taken: DD-SIMCA classification of three-way data, through PARAFAC and Tucker decompositions.
◆ Where it's heading
The shape of the package has been managed deliberately rather than allowed to sprawl. Procrustes cross-validation grew large enough to warrant its own package and was moved out to pcv in 0.14.0; preprocessing was consolidated in 0.12.0 into a composable prep() framework rather than a set of loose functions. Around that, the recurring work is numerical: a more stable SIMPLS implementation, cross-validation rewritten to accept user-supplied segment indices, prep.savgol() and prep.alsbasecorr() rewritten for speed, and now the baseline iteration default raised to match the web applications the maintainer also runs.
◆ Prediction
Three-way DD-SIMCA arrives with two decompositions and no companion regression or resolution methods for multiway data, so extending the multiway path to the rest of the toolkit is the obvious follow-up. The alignment of defaults with the maintainer's web applications suggests those two codebases will keep being reconciled.
Alternatives to crandep and mdatools
Other Infra & APIs 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 crandep or mdatools.
NGINX
nginx returns to feature work with PROXY v2 upstream writes, and quietly adds JSON to core.
ESPHome
ESPHome closes the 2026.8 cycle, but the release body is a bare link to the real notes.
vcfR
A genomics workhorse whose visible release feed stops dead in mid-2020.
dialr
The R phone-number package stopped only parsing numbers and started asking them where they are.
ggVennDiagram
A Venn diagram package whose public release notes say almost nothing — including about its copyright cleanup.
See all crandep alternatives → · See all mdatools alternatives →
Recent activity from crandep and mdatools
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agomdatoolsDD-SIMCA classification arrives for three-way data ⚡
- 5mo agomdatoolsv. 0.15.0
- 1y agocrandepDependency harvest split in two so orphan packages stop disappearing
- 1y agocrandepTrailing commas in CRAN metadata no longer produce empty-name rows
- 2y agomdatoolsData frames converted to matrices automatically for model training
- 2y agocrandepConstrained two-component mixture with continuity at the threshold
- 2y agocrandepArgument names normalised to x_max; MCMC wrapper defaults set
- 2y agocrandepTZP-power-law mixture fills the gap between the 2- and 3-component models
- 2y agocrandepProfile posteriors and chained MCMC wrappers for the mixture models
- 3y agomdatoolscv.scope lets centering and scaling follow the global or local set
- 3y agomdatoolsProcrustes cross-validation moves out to its own pcv package ⚡
- 3y agomdatoolsgetRegcoeffs() fixed for unscaled models; ipls() gains a full mode
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between crandep and mdatools?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. crandep and mdatools 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 crandep better than mdatools?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. crandep and mdatools 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 Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to crandep?
Top crandep alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "crandep alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/crandep for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to mdatools?
Top mdatools alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mdatools alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mdatools for the full list with editorial commentary on each.