HydroPortailStats
France's national flood statistics, ported out of Fortran and into R.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
daedalus vs ggdist
A side-by-side editorial comparison of daedalus and ggdist — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
daedalus vs ggdist: at a glance
What is daedalus?
An epidemic-economic model teaching its interventions to react to the outbreak itself.
daedalus couples an infectious-disease model to sector-level economic costs, letting users test non-pharmaceutical interventions against both epidemic and fiscal outcomes. Over autumn 2025 the intervention layer went from a single fixed closure to sequential timed NPIs and then to closures that lift in response to the model's own instantaneous reproduction number. Alongside that, the cost functions were reworked so illness states map more carefully onto lost productivity.
What is ggdist?
The grammar of uncertainty visualization, now drawing the uncertainty in its own estimates.
ggdist supplies ggplot2 with a compositional vocabulary for distributions — slabs, intervals, dotplots and the sub-geometries that combine them. The last three years moved it from a drawing library to an estimation library: bounded density estimation with Sheather-Jones bandwidth became the default, weights propagate through every density, interval and point summary, and blurred dotplots render Monte Carlo standard error as visual fuzz. The 2025 release rounds this out with per-geometry thickness subscales and settable global defaults.
daedalus vs ggdist: editorial side-by-side
daedalus
0.0INFRA · APIS
An epidemic-economic model teaching its interventions to react to the outbreak itself.
◆ Current state
daedalus couples an infectious-disease model to sector-level economic costs, letting users test non-pharmaceutical interventions against both epidemic and fiscal outcomes. Over autumn 2025 the intervention layer went from a single fixed closure to sequential timed NPIs and then to closures that lift in response to the model's own instantaneous reproduction number. Alongside that, the cost functions were reworked so illness states map more carefully onto lost productivity.
◆ Where it's heading
The arc is toward a model that behaves like a policy simulator rather than a scenario calculator: interventions now have their own state machine, R_t is computed inside the ODE system, and event handling has been pulled out of the output object. Correction releases sit between the feature ones, including an indexing fix the maintainers flag as required for accurate projections. The versioning is patch-level but the changes are structural.
◆ Prediction
With R_t and the next-generation matrix now available in-model, the likely next step is richer response rules keyed to those quantities; the entries give no signal on when a stable 1.0 arrives.
ggdist
0.0INFRA · APIS
The grammar of uncertainty visualization, now drawing the uncertainty in its own estimates.
◆ Current state
ggdist supplies ggplot2 with a compositional vocabulary for distributions — slabs, intervals, dotplots and the sub-geometries that combine them. The last three years moved it from a drawing library to an estimation library: bounded density estimation with Sheather-Jones bandwidth became the default, weights propagate through every density, interval and point summary, and blurred dotplots render Monte Carlo standard error as visual fuzz. The 2025 release rounds this out with per-geometry thickness subscales and settable global defaults.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run in parallel and keep converging. One is statistical: pluggable density estimators arrived first, then became the default, then gained weights and quantile histograms. The other is compositional: sub-geometries acquired their own guides, then their own scales, so a slab's thickness axis is now a first-class annotated dimension. Cadence has stretched from twice-yearly to roughly annual, with the recent work tightening existing surface rather than opening new.
◆ Prediction
Subguides gained subscales a release later, so the remaining asymmetry is in the sub-geometry system rather than the statistics; expect the next release to continue that fill-in work.
Alternatives to daedalus and ggdist
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 daedalus or ggdist.
bsvarSIGNs
Sign, zero and narrative restrictions brought into the bsvars ecosystem.
estimatr
Fast design-based estimators for experiments, coasting on CRAN patches.
ipaddress
IP address vectors for R that hit 1.0 and then went quiet.
ltertools
A column-key toolkit for stitching decades of ecological field data into one table.
finnts
Microsoft's automated forecasting framework, still mostly a one-maintainer effort.
See all daedalus alternatives → · See all ggdist alternatives →
Recent activity from daedalus and ggdist
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 9mo agodaedalusVersion bump for a symposium preview build
- 9mo agodaedalusInterventions now lift in response to live R_t ⚡
- 10mo agodaedalusWithin-sector contact scaling corrected to quadratic
- 10mo agodaedalusIllness-driven absence reworked in the cost model
- 10mo agodaedalusMultiple sequential time-limited closures
- 11mo agodaedalusState array indexing corrections; earlier projections unreliable
- 1y agoggdistPer-geometry thickness subscales and settable defaults
- 2y agoggdistBlurred dotplots draw Monte Carlo error; weights reach every estimator ⚡
- 2y agoggdistC++ dotplot binning and safer bandwidth fallbacks
- 3y agoggdistBounded density becomes the default; existing charts change ⚡
- 3y agoggdistCategorical distributions, hex layouts, pluggable density estimators
- 4y agoggdistComputed variables shared across sub-geometries
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between daedalus and ggdist?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. daedalus and ggdist 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 daedalus better than ggdist?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. daedalus and ggdist 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 daedalus?
Top daedalus alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "daedalus alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/daedalus for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ggdist?
Top ggdist alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggdist alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggdist for the full list with editorial commentary on each.