randomwalk
randomwalk spent every release getting an R simulation to run in the browser, not on a server.
Comparison · Analytics
questionr vs tglkmeans
A side-by-side editorial comparison of questionr and tglkmeans — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
questionr vs tglkmeans: at a glance
What is questionr?
questionr's survey helpers are finished; recent releases only keep pace with R-devel.
A long-running toolkit for survey data in R — proportion tables, weighted counts, and the interactive irec(), iorder() and icut() addins for recoding. The last functional release was 0.8.0 in March 2025: a new freqtable() function, prop(), cprop() and rprop() extended to tables of three or more dimensions, and the addins moved onto the native pipe and forcats' current API. Both releases since exist purely to fix tests broken by R-devel changes to table internals.
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.
questionr vs tglkmeans: editorial side-by-side
questionr
0.0ANALYTICS
questionr's survey helpers are finished; recent releases only keep pace with R-devel.
◆ Current state
A long-running toolkit for survey data in R — proportion tables, weighted counts, and the interactive irec(), iorder() and icut() addins for recoding. The last functional release was 0.8.0 in March 2025: a new freqtable() function, prop(), cprop() and rprop() extended to tables of three or more dimensions, and the addins moved onto the native pipe and forcats' current API. Both releases since exist purely to fix tests broken by R-devel changes to table internals.
◆ Where it's heading
This is a stable package in compatibility-maintenance mode, where the release trigger is upstream churn rather than user demand. The functional work that does appear follows a consistent line — generalising the table functions beyond two dimensions, and keeping the interactive recoding addins aligned with current tidyverse idioms rather than the deprecated ones they were written against. The same maintainer's rainette shipped its own upstream-compatibility fix in the same window.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next release to be another R-devel or tidyverse compatibility fix; nothing in the entries points to new functionality.
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 questionr 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 questionr or tglkmeans.
fastml
fastml added survival modelling and leakage-proof resampling, moving past classification and regression.
abclass
abclass built out angle-based classifiers in 2022, then went quiet except for CRAN upkeep.
churon
churon is spending its entire release history getting a Rust ONNX binding through CRAN.
firatheme
firatheme woke up after four years and started fixing what ggplot2 changed underneath it.
bagyo
bagyo reached CRAN as a Philippine tropical cyclone dataset, with its tags stamped out of order.
See all questionr alternatives → · See all tglkmeans alternatives →
Recent activity from questionr and tglkmeans
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2mo agotglkmeansSpearman metric no longer ranks missing values as the largest
- 6mo agoquestionrR-devel test fix for NA naming in tables
- 1y agoquestionrR-devel test fix for table subset classes
- 1y agoquestionrfreqtable added; proportion tables handle three or more dimensions
- 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
- 3y agoquestionrAddins handle non-syntactic variable names
- 4y agoquestionrforcats errors on numeric variables fixed
- 4y agoquestionricut default changed; rp2018 dataset replaces rp99
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between questionr and tglkmeans?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. questionr 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 questionr better than tglkmeans?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. questionr 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 questionr?
Top questionr alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "questionr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/questionr 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.