rjd3highfreq
rjd3highfreq ships whatever the Java side ships, and only occasionally says what that was.
Comparison · Analytics
distributional vs wasserportal
A side-by-side editorial comparison of distributional and wasserportal — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
distributional vs wasserportal: at a glance
| Feature | distributional | wasserportal |
|---|---|---|
| Sector | Analytics | Analytics |
| Velocity score | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Sparks · 30d | 0 | 0 |
| Top themes | r-package, probability-distributions, distribution-arithmetic, numerical-methods | groundwater-monitoring, web-scraping, thingsboard, iot-telemetry |
| Last editorial update | 48m ago | 1h ago |
| Website | Visit → | Visit → |
What is distributional?
distributional taught + and - to work on any pair of distributions, closing the algebra it started with.
The R package providing vectorised distribution objects — the substrate that forecasting and anomaly tooling in the same ecosystem builds on. Cadence has picked up sharply, with four releases in the six months to June 2026 against roughly one a year before that. Two kinds of work alternate: adding distribution families (Dirichlet, Horseshoe, Laplace, multivariate t, g-and-k, the extreme-value pair) and deepening what can be computed generically across all of them.
What is wasserportal?
A Berlin groundwater scraper grew a full IoT publishing pipeline in two days.
wasserportal scrapes groundwater and surface water monitoring data from Wasserportal Berlin — station metadata, water levels, quality series. For its first four years that was the whole product, with releases tracking the portal's own churn: a new API version in 2023, new three-letter variable codes, and a 2026 fix decoding pages as windows-1252 because the server declares UTF-8 but emits Latin-1. In June 2026 it added a ThingsBoard integration, then extended it to self-hosted instances two days later.
distributional vs wasserportal: editorial side-by-side
distributional
0.0ANALYTICS
distributional taught + and - to work on any pair of distributions, closing the algebra it started with.
◆ Current state
The R package providing vectorised distribution objects — the substrate that forecasting and anomaly tooling in the same ecosystem builds on. Cadence has picked up sharply, with four releases in the six months to June 2026 against roughly one a year before that. Two kinds of work alternate: adding distribution families (Dirichlet, Horseshoe, Laplace, multivariate t, g-and-k, the extreme-value pair) and deepening what can be computed generically across all of them.
◆ Where it's heading
The generic-computation thread is the one that matters and it has been building steadily: a Monte Carlo default method for cdf(), has_symmetry() to let algorithms specialise, hdr() moving to exact results for symmetric distributions and 4096 quantiles elsewhere, open-versus-closed support intervals. Version 0.8.0 is where that thread arrives somewhere — arithmetic on arbitrary distributions, with closed forms used when they exist and numerical convolution when they do not. The package is positioning itself as a computational layer rather than a catalogue, which is consistent with how weird and the forecasting packages consume it.
◆ Prediction
Expect the numerical machinery behind dist_convolved() to be reused for other operators, and more generics like has_symmetry() that let downstream algorithms take exact paths when a distribution supports them.
wasserportal
0.0ANALYTICS
A Berlin groundwater scraper grew a full IoT publishing pipeline in two days.
◆ Current state
wasserportal scrapes groundwater and surface water monitoring data from Wasserportal Berlin — station metadata, water levels, quality series. For its first four years that was the whole product, with releases tracking the portal's own churn: a new API version in 2023, new three-letter variable codes, and a 2026 fix decoding pages as windows-1252 because the server declares UTF-8 but emits Latin-1. In June 2026 it added a ThingsBoard integration, then extended it to self-hosted instances two days later.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is repositioning from a data-access library into the first half of a monitoring pipeline. 0.6.0 shipped push helpers, device discovery and cleanup, an importable dashboard and a GitHub Actions workflow; 0.7.0 immediately generalised the authentication so it works against self-hosted Community Edition rather than only the Cloud tier, and lifted the push from a five-station demo to the entire groundwater archive. The hardening detail in 0.7.0 — retries on 5xx, warnings when only one of two credentials is set — reads like a maintainer who has run this against a real deployment.
◆ Prediction
The obvious next step is extending the ThingsBoard path to the surface water stations, which the package has flagged as under-supported since 0.1.0. The entries show no other direction under construction.
Alternatives to distributional and wasserportal
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 distributional or wasserportal.
audubon
audubon's release feed is almost entirely Renovate bumping the JavaScript toolchain behind its Japanese text splitter.
affiner
affiner is quietly turning a grid transformation helper into a small computational geometry library.
ageproR
ageproR spent two years chasing a moving file format, then added the recruitment models that justify the effort.
r-ledger
ledger adds a Rust toolchain fallback, so beancount imports work whether or not the Python tooling is installed.
gridpattern
gridpattern keeps widening its catalogue, and the newest patterns finally use the device's own line rendering.
See all distributional alternatives → · See all wasserportal alternatives →
Recent activity from distributional and wasserportal
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agodistributionalConditional S3 registration so the package loads on R before 4.3
- 1mo agodistributionalDistribution arithmetic: FFT convolution behind the + and - operators ⚡
- 1mo agowasserportalSelf-hosted ThingsBoard support via JWT login
- 1mo agowasserportalThingsBoard integration turns the scraper into a pipeline ⚡
- 2mo agodistributionalVectorised p in quantile() for inflated distributions; open brackets on infinite bounds
- 3mo agowasserportalwindows-1252 decoding fixes umlaut handling on Windows
- 5mo agodistributionalDirichlet and Horseshoe distributions added
- 7mo agodistributionalhas_symmetry() generic, exact HDRs for symmetric distributions
- 1y agodistributionalMonte Carlo cdf() default method; g-and-k, g-and-h and extreme-value families
- 3y agowasserportalExport and import functions for scraped datasets
- 3y agowasserportalAdapted to Wasserportal's new API version
- 4y agowasserportalTemperature parameter naming corrected
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between distributional and wasserportal?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. distributional and wasserportal 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 distributional better than wasserportal?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. distributional and wasserportal 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.
What are the best alternatives to distributional?
Top distributional alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "distributional alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/distributional-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to wasserportal?
Top wasserportal alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "wasserportal alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/wasserportal for the full list with editorial commentary on each.