bagyo
bagyo reached CRAN as a Philippine tropical cyclone dataset, with its tags stamped out of order.
Comparison · Analytics
fillpattern vs tglkmeans
A side-by-side editorial comparison of fillpattern and tglkmeans — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
fillpattern vs tglkmeans: at a glance
What is fillpattern?
Pattern fills for ggplot2, hardened against the ways users write sizes
fillpattern provides pattern fills — stripes, bricks, dots — for ggplot2 and base R graphics, aimed at figures that must stay legible in greyscale or to colour-blind readers. The 1.0.3 release is mostly defensive: size modifier strings ending in a colon no longer swap width for height, modify_size() reports invalid units instead of crashing and understands in, inches and cm, and a background colour bug in scale_fill_pattern() is fixed. The minimum R version rises to 4.2.0 for recent graphics engine features.
What is tglkmeans?
A k-means implementation that just told users their Spearman clustering on missing data was wrong
tglkmeans is a multi-core k-means implementation with seeding, aimed at single-cell and other large matrix workloads. Version 0.4.0 flipped the id_column default and moved to R's random number generator, 0.5.x added count-matrix downsampling and fixed id handling, and 0.6.3 in May 2026 is a correctness release: Spearman distance was ranking missing values as the largest value instead of dropping them, and predict_tgl_kmeans() with Euclidean distance did not reproduce the training metric when a cluster center had a missing dimension.
fillpattern vs tglkmeans: editorial side-by-side
fillpattern
0.0ANALYTICS
Pattern fills for ggplot2, hardened against the ways users write sizes
◆ Current state
fillpattern provides pattern fills — stripes, bricks, dots — for ggplot2 and base R graphics, aimed at figures that must stay legible in greyscale or to colour-blind readers. The 1.0.3 release is mostly defensive: size modifier strings ending in a colon no longer swap width for height, modify_size() reports invalid units instead of crashing and understands in, inches and cm, and a background colour bug in scale_fill_pattern() is fixed. The minimum R version rises to 4.2.0 for recent graphics engine features.
◆ Where it's heading
Development is slow and entirely reactive to how the string-based size interface fails. The pattern across releases is the same: a user hits an edge — very small fill areas in 1.0.2, malformed unit strings in 1.0.3 — and the fix is either a graceful fallback or a clearer error. Leaning on R's newer graphics engine rather than reimplementing pattern rendering keeps the package small at the cost of raising its version floor.
◆ Prediction
Expect further releases to stay in the same register: parsing and validation fixes for the size and unit interface, with the pattern set itself unlikely to change.
tglkmeans
0.0ANALYTICS
A k-means implementation that just told users their Spearman clustering on missing data was wrong
◆ Current state
tglkmeans is a multi-core k-means implementation with seeding, aimed at single-cell and other large matrix workloads. Version 0.4.0 flipped the id_column default and moved to R's random number generator, 0.5.x added count-matrix downsampling and fixed id handling, and 0.6.3 in May 2026 is a correctness release: Spearman distance was ranking missing values as the largest value instead of dropping them, and predict_tgl_kmeans() with Euclidean distance did not reproduce the training metric when a cluster center had a missing dimension.
◆ Where it's heading
The package handles missing data across three distance metrics, and 0.6.3 shows those paths had drifted apart — Spearman behaved unlike Euclidean and Pearson, and prediction behaved unlike training. Both fixes change results on affected data, and the release notes are careful to bound exactly where: Spearman on data with NAs changes, complete data does not. Performance work runs alongside, with the dense per-thread vote matrix removed from the reassignment step.
◆ Prediction
With the metric paths now aligned on missing-value handling, further work is more likely to target the parallel reassignment internals than the distance semantics.
Alternatives to fillpattern and tglkmeans
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 fillpattern or tglkmeans.
rainette
rainette rebuilt its Reinert clustering in 0.2.0, tuned it in 0.3.0, and has coasted since.
questionr
questionr's survey helpers are finished; recent releases only keep pace with R-devel.
washdata
washdata is a fixed survey dataset; eight years of releases have changed only its packaging.
singlercapture
singleRcapture reached 1.0.0 with no release notes at all — the arc has to be read backwards.
crossmap
crossmap's roadmap is set by purrr and furrr — it deprecates what upstream deprecates.
See all fillpattern alternatives → · See all tglkmeans alternatives →
Recent activity from fillpattern and tglkmeans
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2mo agotglkmeansSpearman metric no longer ranks missing values as the largest
- 6mo agofillpatternSize string parsing fixed; invalid units now report instead of crash
- 2y agofillpatternSmall fill areas no longer crash; min_size falls back to solid
- 2y agofillpatternfillpattern 1.0.1
- 2y agotglkmeansFixes corrupted cluster ids and dropped dimnames
- 2y agotglkmeansAdds downsample_matrix() for count matrices
- 2y agotglkmeansBreaking: id_column defaults to FALSE, switches to R's RNG
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between fillpattern and tglkmeans?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. fillpattern and tglkmeans 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 fillpattern better than tglkmeans?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. fillpattern and tglkmeans 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 fillpattern?
Top fillpattern alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "fillpattern alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/fillpattern for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to tglkmeans?
Top tglkmeans alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "tglkmeans alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/tglkmeans for the full list with editorial commentary on each.