compositional.mle
An MLE package rebuilt around composable solvers, then renamed to match.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of popbayes and revdbayes — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
A wildlife population-trend package in low-maintenance mode.
popbayes fits Bayesian trends to animal population count series that mix ground counts, aerial counts and expert estimates. The visible history is short and slow: three releases across four years, with the most recent, 1.3, swapping usethis for cli in error messages and tidying the website. The substantive work in the window is 1.1, which reorganised how format_data() handles a dataset.
Extreme value sampling in pure upkeep mode, mostly answering to Rcpp and CRAN.
revdbayes performs Bayesian extreme value analysis using ratio-of-uniforms sampling, giving random samples rather than MCMC chains. Every entry in the visible window is filed under bug fixes and minor improvements. The most recent, 1.5.7, strips missing values before fitting the generalised Pareto MLE; the two before it are an Rcpp compatibility patch and a response to CRAN check failures that turned out to be false positives.
popbayes fits Bayesian trends to animal population count series that mix ground counts, aerial counts and expert estimates. The visible history is short and slow: three releases across four years, with the most recent, 1.3, swapping usethis for cli in error messages and tidying the website. The substantive work in the window is 1.1, which reorganised how format_data() handles a dataset.
Development has settled into maintenance carried largely by outside contributors, with the current release consisting of a dependency swap and message fixes from two different contributors. The one release with real design work, 1.1, moved format_data() from operating on a whole dataset to operating per count series, letting different series of the same species carry different conversion assumptions. Nothing since has changed the modelling surface.
The entries do not support a confident prediction beyond further contributor-driven maintenance; there is no visible signal of new modelling work.
revdbayes performs Bayesian extreme value analysis using ratio-of-uniforms sampling, giving random samples rather than MCMC chains. Every entry in the visible window is filed under bug fixes and minor improvements. The most recent, 1.5.7, strips missing values before fitting the generalised Pareto MLE; the two before it are an Rcpp compatibility patch and a response to CRAN check failures that turned out to be false positives.
The methods are settled and the release traffic is external: Rcpp issues, CRAN platform checks, documentation anchor requirements. Two of the six releases exist only because CRAN's check farm flagged something, and one of those flags resolved itself. Sibling package profileCI from the same maintainer has been more active, which suggests attention has moved to newer work rather than away from R entirely.
Expect further small releases driven by Rcpp or CRAN check changes rather than by the sampling methods.
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 popbayes or revdbayes.
An MLE package rebuilt around composable solvers, then renamed to match.
nabla dropped its C++ engine to chase exact derivatives at any order.
Eight months from first release to keyring caching and workload identity.
A research-project workflow package where the interesting work is in the plumbing.
A cyclomatic complexity checker that ships once every couple of years, and lands when it does.
A package retired in 2017 just got rewritten against R's public C API.
See all popbayes alternatives → · See all revdbayes alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — bayesian, maintenance — within Analytics. popbayes and revdbayes 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. popbayes and revdbayes 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 popbayes alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "popbayes alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/popbayes for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top revdbayes alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "revdbayes alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/revdbayes for the full list with editorial commentary on each.