vcfR
A genomics workhorse whose visible release feed stops dead in mid-2020.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
DMRnet vs states
A side-by-side editorial comparison of DMRnet and states — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
DMRnet vs states: at a glance
What is DMRnet?
A categorical-variable selection package that publishes its full test logs as release candidates.
DMRnet implements delete-or-merge-regressors model selection for high-dimensional categorical data, alongside SOSnet and GLAMER variants from the same research group. Development is slow and academic — 0.4.0 in 2023, then two years to 0.4.1 in August 2025, which corrects an invalid lambda.1se computation and the cross-validation plots that displayed it. Every real release is preceded days earlier by a release-candidate entry containing the raw output of the correctness and consistency test suite.
What is states?
State-panel tooling holding steady since its 2020 data and ergonomics release.
states supplies the Gleditsch & Ward and Correlates of War state lists and the tooling to turn them into country-year or country-month panels, with plot_missing() for coverage checks. The substantive work landed in 2020; the releases since are compatibility fixes against ggplot2, dplyr, readr and testthat. The most recent entry is a single test repair.
DMRnet vs states: editorial side-by-side
DMRnet
0.0INFRA · APIS
A categorical-variable selection package that publishes its full test logs as release candidates.
◆ Current state
DMRnet implements delete-or-merge-regressors model selection for high-dimensional categorical data, alongside SOSnet and GLAMER variants from the same research group. Development is slow and academic — 0.4.0 in 2023, then two years to 0.4.1 in August 2025, which corrects an invalid lambda.1se computation and the cross-validation plots that displayed it. Every real release is preceded days earlier by a release-candidate entry containing the raw output of the correctness and consistency test suite.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is converging on correctness rather than expanding. 0.3.3 was a wall of fixes to inference, log-likelihood, and degenerate cross-validation cases; 0.4.0 added the var_sel algorithm and brought GLAMER into the package's own net idiom over its tau parameter; 0.4.1 is again a statistical correctness fix. The published test-log releases are the tell — this maintainer treats reproducible evidence that hard cases still pass as part of the release artifact, which is unusual outside academic statistical software.
◆ Prediction
Given the two-year gap before 0.4.1 and its narrow scope, the next release is most likely another correctness fix arriving on a multi-year cadence, again preceded by a full test-log release candidate.
states
0.0INFRA · APIS
State-panel tooling holding steady since its 2020 data and ergonomics release.
◆ Current state
states supplies the Gleditsch & Ward and Correlates of War state lists and the tooling to turn them into country-year or country-month panels, with plot_missing() for coverage checks. The substantive work landed in 2020; the releases since are compatibility fixes against ggplot2, dplyr, readr and testthat. The most recent entry is a single test repair.
◆ Where it's heading
The package has reached the point where its own data and API are settled and the release trigger is upstream churn in the tidyverse. What movement there is goes toward making the two state lists interchangeable, with the microstates coding carried from G&W onto the COW data as the clearest example, rather than toward new datasets.
◆ Prediction
The next release is most likely another compatibility pass; a data refresh would be the signal that the package is active again.
Alternatives to DMRnet and states
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 DMRnet or states.
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.
ordinalsimr
A Shiny app for choosing the right ordinal test reached CRAN in a single 90-minute burst of tags.
transltr
A new R localization package that reached CRAN and immediately downgraded itself to experimental.
hereR
An R client for HERE's location APIs, shaped almost entirely by what the vendor exposes next.
See all DMRnet alternatives → · See all states alternatives →
Recent activity from DMRnet and states
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 0y agostatesplot_missing() test fixed for the next ggplot2
- 1y agoDMRnetInvalid lambda.1se computation corrected in cross-validation
- 1y agoDMRnetTest-suite log published ahead of the 0.4.1 release
- 2y agostatesggplot2 and dplyr deprecation cleanup
- 2y agostatesBundled state data stripped to plain data frames
- 3y agoDMRnetvar_sel added; GLAMER reworked as a net over tau
- 3y agoDMRnetTest-suite log published ahead of the 0.4.0 release
- 3y agoDMRnetInference, log-likelihood, and degenerate-CV fixes across all model families
- 3y agoDMRnetTest-suite log published ahead of the 0.3.3 release
- 5y agostatesMicrostate coding for COW data and state_panel() shortcuts
- 7y agostatesSimpler defaults for state_panel() and plot_missing()
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between DMRnet and states?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. DMRnet and states 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 DMRnet better than states?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. DMRnet and states 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 DMRnet?
Top DMRnet alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "DMRnet alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/dmrnet for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to states?
Top states alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "states alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/states for the full list with editorial commentary on each.