miscmetabar
A phyloseq toolbox keeps absorbing metabarcoding methods, and has started splitting into a family.
Comparison · Analytics
fastglm vs fastml
A side-by-side editorial comparison of fastglm and fastml — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
fastglm vs fastml: at a glance
What is fastglm?
A fast GLM solver stops being one function and becomes a count-model family
fastglm ran C++ IRLS for standard generalized linear models for six years with almost no releases. In May 2026 it added three top-level model types — negative binomial with jointly estimated dispersion, hurdle, and zero-inflated — each with the entire fitting driver in C++ rather than an R loop around a C++ kernel. The following release generalised Firth bias reduction to every standard family across dense, sparse and streaming backends.
What is fastml?
fastml added survival modelling and leakage-proof resampling, moving past classification and regression.
A tidymodels-based AutoML wrapper that trains, tunes and compares many engines from one call. The 0.6.x line added engine-specific tuning parameters, class-imbalance handling, early stopping and DALEX-based explainability. The 0.7.5 release is far larger: a full survival analysis task with its own engines, MICE imputation and integrated Brier scoring, plus unbiased nested cross-validation, grouped, blocked and rolling resampling helpers, fold-wise imputation, recipe leakage checks, and a sandbox for user-supplied preprocessing.
fastglm vs fastml: editorial side-by-side
fastglm
0.0ANALYTICS
A fast GLM solver stops being one function and becomes a count-model family
◆ Current state
fastglm ran C++ IRLS for standard generalized linear models for six years with almost no releases. In May 2026 it added three top-level model types — negative binomial with jointly estimated dispersion, hurdle, and zero-inflated — each with the entire fitting driver in C++ rather than an R loop around a C++ kernel. The following release generalised Firth bias reduction to every standard family across dense, sparse and streaming backends.
◆ Where it's heading
The package changed what it is. Through 0.0.3 it was a drop-in replacement for glm() competing on speed; from 0.1.0 it targets the models people leave base R for — MASS::glm.nb, pscl::hurdle, pscl::zeroinfl — and reimplements their full estimation loops natively. The 0.1.1 follow-up is consolidation on that new surface: Firth generalised past binomial logit, SQUAREM acceleration on the zero-inflation EM driver, and a run of clamping guards and initialization fixes on the families most prone to overflow.
◆ Prediction
The numerical-stability work in 0.1.1 clusters on Tweedie and the inverse and sqrt link families, which suggests those paths are the newest and least exercised — expect further correctness fixes there before new model types.
fastml
0.0ANALYTICS
fastml added survival modelling and leakage-proof resampling, moving past classification and regression.
◆ Current state
A tidymodels-based AutoML wrapper that trains, tunes and compares many engines from one call. The 0.6.x line added engine-specific tuning parameters, class-imbalance handling, early stopping and DALEX-based explainability. The 0.7.5 release is far larger: a full survival analysis task with its own engines, MICE imputation and integrated Brier scoring, plus unbiased nested cross-validation, grouped, blocked and rolling resampling helpers, fold-wise imputation, recipe leakage checks, and a sandbox for user-supplied preprocessing.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is moving from convenience wrapper to something that has to be defensible statistically. Nested cross-validation, fold-wise rather than up-front imputation, and explicit leakage checks are all corrections to the shortcuts that make AutoML easy and its scores optimistic. Survival adds a third task type alongside classification and regression, and it arrived with its own metrics rather than being bolted onto the existing ones. Note the entry body is cut off at 8,000 characters, so the release is larger than what is shown.
◆ Prediction
Expect the remaining survival engines to fill in and the sandboxing of custom preprocessing to tighten, since both were still being iterated on within this same release's commit list.
Alternatives to fastglm and fastml
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 fastglm or fastml.
arcgisutils
The R-ArcGIS plumbing layer grew a portal administration API and geoprocessing job support.
bootStateSpace
A parametric bootstrap for state-space models, shipped and then left alone.
benviplot
A Brazilian housing-data palette package went from internal tooling to public 1.0 in five days.
labelled
The bridge between Stata/SPSS labelled data and tidy R keeps widening, one integration at a time.
flashlight
flashlight hit 1.0 by giving away its SHAP feature and making most of its API internal.
See all fastglm alternatives → · See all fastml alternatives →
Recent activity from fastglm and fastml
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2mo agofastglmFirth generalised to all families, plus SQUAREM and stability fixes
- 3mo agofastglmCRAN release 0.1.0 ⚡
- 8mo agofastmlVersion 0.7.5 ⚡
- 1y agofastmlEngine-specific tuning, imbalance handling and explainability
- 1y agofastmlSingle-workflow evaluation fix
- 1y agofastmlVersion 0.5.0
- 4y agofastglmC++ headers exposed for linking
- 7y agofastglmFirst CRAN release of the C++ IRLS solver
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between fastglm and fastml?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. fastglm and fastml 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 fastglm better than fastml?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. fastglm and fastml 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 fastglm?
Top fastglm alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "fastglm alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/fastglm for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to fastml?
Top fastml alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "fastml alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/fastml for the full list with editorial commentary on each.