rollupTree
The recursive-computation engine under massProps grows the accessors its consumer needed
Comparison · Infra & APIs
echos vs prospectr
A side-by-side editorial comparison of echos and prospectr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
echos vs prospectr: at a glance
What is echos?
Echo state networks for R forecasting, filling in the pieces a fable model is expected to have.
echos fits echo state networks, a reservoir-computing approach to time series forecasting, and exposes them through the fabletools model interface so they sit alongside other models in a fable workflow. The three releases in this window take it from a working model to a complete one: forecast intervals in 1.0.2, hyperparameter tuning by rolling-origin cross-validation in 1.0.3, and documentation covering the architecture, hyperparameters and tuning workflow in 1.0.4. Cadence is a few releases a year.
What is prospectr?
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
prospectr provides the signal-processing layer for near-infrared and visible spectroscopy in R — Savitzky-Golay and gap-segment derivatives, standard normal variate, detrending, continuum removal, splice correction, plus calibration sampling algorithms like Kennard-Stone and DUPLEX and readers for ASD and BUCHI NIRCal instrument files. The May release is the substantial one: a long list of corrections to functions that were returning wrong or missing values rather than failing.
echos vs prospectr: editorial side-by-side
echos
0.0INFRA · APIS
Echo state networks for R forecasting, filling in the pieces a fable model is expected to have.
◆ Current state
echos fits echo state networks, a reservoir-computing approach to time series forecasting, and exposes them through the fabletools model interface so they sit alongside other models in a fable workflow. The three releases in this window take it from a working model to a complete one: forecast intervals in 1.0.2, hyperparameter tuning by rolling-origin cross-validation in 1.0.3, and documentation covering the architecture, hyperparameters and tuning workflow in 1.0.4. Cadence is a few releases a year.
◆ Where it's heading
The arc here is a model implementation earning its place in an established framework. Point forecasts came first, then the interval forecasts that any fable-compatible model is expected to produce, generated by bootstrapping residuals and taking quantiles from simulated paths, then the tuning machinery that makes the reservoir hyperparameters usable by people who do not already know what alpha and rho do. Version 1.0.4 spending its whole release on documentation and a clearer dataset name is consistent with that: the remaining barrier is comprehension, not capability.
◆ Prediction
With intervals and tuning in place, the natural next step is broader integration with the fable ecosystem, such as handling multiple series or ensembling with other model types. The entries do not indicate whether the maintainer intends to go further into reservoir variants or to stabilise what is here.
prospectr
0.0INFRA · APIS
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
◆ Current state
prospectr provides the signal-processing layer for near-infrared and visible spectroscopy in R — Savitzky-Golay and gap-segment derivatives, standard normal variate, detrending, continuum removal, splice correction, plus calibration sampling algorithms like Kennard-Stone and DUPLEX and readers for ASD and BUCHI NIRCal instrument files. The May release is the substantial one: a long list of corrections to functions that were returning wrong or missing values rather than failing.
◆ Where it's heading
The recent work is corrective rather than additive, and several items changed results silently before being caught. continuumRemoval() derived its convex-hull boundary offset from a fixed one-wavelength assumption that broke for fine-resolution spectra or non-nanometre units; cochranTest() passed an invalid argument name to prcomp() and produced incorrect principal component scores; readASD() silently dropped spectra in one branch of its text path. Two file readers were leaking connections. Alongside that runs a smaller thread of decoupling preprocessing steps from each other, most visibly detrend() gaining an snv argument so polynomial detrending can run without the SNV transform that Barnes et al. bundled with it.
◆ Prediction
The detrend() decoupling is the only recent addition and it fits a broader pipeline-composition direction, so similar separation of other bundled preprocessing steps is the plausible next move. The misspelled substraction argument now carries a deprecation warning, which schedules its removal for a future release.
Alternatives to echos and prospectr
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 echos or prospectr.
massProps
A mass-properties rollup spends a year on documentation and follows its sibling's API
writeAlizer
Six months of releases and not one of them touched the scoring models
samplr
A cognitive-science sampling package ships once, then goes quiet for eighteen months
stochvol
A Bayesian volatility sampler in its maintenance decade, paying for its own speed
midr
A black-box interpreter reaches CRAN, then learns multi-class and survival responses
See all echos alternatives → · See all prospectr alternatives →
Recent activity from echos and prospectr
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoprospectrdetrend() can run without a prior SNV transformation
- 2mo agoechosDocumentation expanded; M4 dataset renamed
- 2mo agoprospectrContinuum removal, SNV and cochranTest corrected; readers stop leaking
- 5mo agoechostune_esn() tunes reservoir hyperparameters by cross-validation
- 1y agoechosForecast intervals added via moving block bootstrap
- 1y agoprospectrread_nircal() sample ID field fix
- 3y agoprospectrNon-UTF8 sample IDs no longer become NA
- 4y agoprospectrkenStone() bug fix
- 4y agoprospectrread_nircal() execution failure fixed
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between echos and prospectr?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. echos and prospectr 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 echos better than prospectr?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. echos and prospectr 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 echos?
Top echos alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "echos alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/echos for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to prospectr?
Top prospectr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "prospectr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/prospectr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.