n2kanalysis
n2kanalysis has spent eight years wiring INLA models to an S3 bucket.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of mapSpain and shapviz — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
mapSpain's 1.0.0 broke every user cache to get the package onto modern foundations.
mapSpain provides administrative boundaries, tile providers and geographic dictionaries for Spain, pulling from GISCO, SIANE, INE and IGN sources. The 1.0.0 release in January 2026 rebuilt it: requests moved to httr2, the cache reorganized into topic-based subfolders under tools::R_user_dir() instead of rappdirs, R 4.1 became the floor, and every function now returns tidy objects. Existing caches are explicitly incompatible and must be rebuilt.
shapviz refines its SHAP plots release by release while chasing ggplot2's moving target.
shapviz turns SHAP values from XGBoost, LightGBM, H2O, kernelshap and other sources into standard diagnostic plots — importance, dependence, waterfall, force and interaction. Recent work is plot ergonomics: shared y-axis control across dependence plots, a bar view for interaction values, and axis collection via patchwork. The two most recent releases are pure compatibility and bug fixes.
mapSpain provides administrative boundaries, tile providers and geographic dictionaries for Spain, pulling from GISCO, SIANE, INE and IGN sources. The 1.0.0 release in January 2026 rebuilt it: requests moved to httr2, the cache reorganized into topic-based subfolders under tools::R_user_dir() instead of rappdirs, R 4.1 became the floor, and every function now returns tidy objects. Existing caches are explicitly incompatible and must be rebuilt.
The package has finished its modernization and moved into consolidation. 1.1.0 added a configurable query timeout and pinned httr2 for compatibility with giscoR, the sibling package it shares plumbing with; 1.2.0 was a declared internal-only refactor with the public API held fixed and the work described as AI-assisted with human review. The data-source expansion that characterized the 0.9.x and 0.10.x line — comarcas by type, simplified INE geometries, SIANE vintages — has paused while the foundations settle.
Expect a return to source coverage now that the refactor is done: new SIANE or INE vintages and additional boundary types are the pattern this package has repeated. The entries show no further architectural work queued.
shapviz turns SHAP values from XGBoost, LightGBM, H2O, kernelshap and other sources into standard diagnostic plots — importance, dependence, waterfall, force and interaction. Recent work is plot ergonomics: shared y-axis control across dependence plots, a bar view for interaction values, and axis collection via patchwork. The two most recent releases are pure compatibility and bug fixes.
Two threads run in parallel here. One is visual refinement converging on conventions from Python's shap — the 0.10.0 notes openly float switching share_y to TRUE to match it. The other is connector maintenance, keeping pace with H2O, XGBoost 1.x and 2.x, shapr and permshap as each changes. Neither thread adds new explanation methods; shapviz's job is presentation, and it is being polished rather than extended.
Expect share_y = TRUE to become the default and further ggplot2 4.x fallout, with connector updates arriving as the upstream SHAP packages release.
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 mapSpain or shapviz.
n2kanalysis has spent eight years wiring INLA models to an S3 bucket.
A Fortran-descended optimizer got thread-safe, then found two flags that never worked.
ggstatsplot reached 1.0 by adding tests, having outsourced its statistics years ago.
collapse got a JSS paper and a 7x fmean speedup in the same release.
gtsummary is quietly rebuilding itself around analysis results data, one table verb at a time.
broadcast is filling in NumPy-style array broadcasting for R, operator by operator.
See all mapSpain alternatives → · See all shapviz alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. mapSpain and shapviz 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.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. mapSpain and shapviz 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.
Top mapSpain alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mapSpain alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mapspain for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top shapviz alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "shapviz alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/shapviz for the full list with editorial commentary on each.