fastplyr
A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of MVMR and OHPL — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
MVMR spent 2026 discovering its own estimators had been returning the wrong numbers
MVMR implements multivariable Mendelian randomization — conditional instrument strength, pleiotropy tests and heterogeneity-robust effect estimation from GWAS summary data. The package has been releasing steadily through 2026, and the substantive releases are all corrections rather than features. Two core routines were found to be computing the wrong quantity outright: qhet_mvmr() built weights from the minimised objective value instead of the minimiser, and strhet_mvmr() never minimised the Q-statistic at all.
A 2017 chemometrics method frozen in place, visited only when CRAN changes its documentation rules.
OHPL implements ordered homogeneity pursuit lasso, a variable selection method for high-dimensional spectroscopic data that groups correlated predictors before applying a lasso. The functional package was complete by 1.2 in 2017, when prediction, performance evaluation and simulated data generation functions were added. Every release since has touched documentation and packaging only.
MVMR implements multivariable Mendelian randomization — conditional instrument strength, pleiotropy tests and heterogeneity-robust effect estimation from GWAS summary data. The package has been releasing steadily through 2026, and the substantive releases are all corrections rather than features. Two core routines were found to be computing the wrong quantity outright: qhet_mvmr() built weights from the minimised objective value instead of the minimiser, and strhet_mvmr() never minimised the Q-statistic at all.
This is a sustained audit, not a maintenance drift. Each release since February has fixed a specific analytical defect — omitted intercepts in the exposure-on-genotype regressions, a division by zero when a gencov list held exactly two variants, covariance matrices computed wrongly for matrix inputs, a spurious covariance warning — and several explicitly warn that reported values will differ from previous versions. The strhet_mvmr() rewrite to iteratively reweighted least squares also removes a combinatorial grid that could exhaust memory past three exposures, so the function is now usable as well as correct.
The corrections have been walking through the package function by function, and the ones with published fixes so far are the heterogeneity and covariance routines; the remaining untouched estimators are the natural next stop if the audit continues at this pace.
OHPL implements ordered homogeneity pursuit lasso, a variable selection method for high-dimensional spectroscopic data that groups correlated predictors before applying a lasso. The functional package was complete by 1.2 in 2017, when prediction, performance evaluation and simulated data generation functions were added. Every release since has touched documentation and packaging only.
This is a published-method package in the archival phase: the algorithm is fixed, the paper is cited, and the maintainer keeps it installable. The releases read as a timeline of R packaging conventions rather than of the method — tidyverse code style in 2019, roxygen2 Markdown and bibentry() in 2024, Rd HTML validation in 2026. Gaps of two to five years between releases are normal here.
Expect the next release whenever CRAN introduces another documentation or packaging check; there is no indication the method itself will be extended.
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 MVMR or OHPL.
A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.
Belgium's invasive-species indicator toolkit is in steady refinement, one plotting edge case at a time.
The ICES stock assessment client took upload away in 2024 and spent two years giving it back.
A discrete global grid generator grew cell traversal and became a usable spatial index.
Community ecology's standard toolkit is retiring the functions a generation of scripts was built on.
A cloud-chart package quietly swapping its dependencies for its maintainer's own libraries.
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. MVMR and OHPL 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. MVMR and OHPL 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 MVMR alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "MVMR alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mvmr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top OHPL alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "OHPL alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ohpl for the full list with editorial commentary on each.