n2kanalysis
n2kanalysis has spent eight years wiring INLA models to an S3 bucket.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of shapviz and wasserportal — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
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.
A Berlin groundwater scraper grew a full IoT publishing pipeline in two days.
wasserportal scrapes groundwater and surface water monitoring data from Wasserportal Berlin — station metadata, water levels, quality series. For its first four years that was the whole product, with releases tracking the portal's own churn: a new API version in 2023, new three-letter variable codes, and a 2026 fix decoding pages as windows-1252 because the server declares UTF-8 but emits Latin-1. In June 2026 it added a ThingsBoard integration, then extended it to self-hosted instances two days later.
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.
wasserportal scrapes groundwater and surface water monitoring data from Wasserportal Berlin — station metadata, water levels, quality series. For its first four years that was the whole product, with releases tracking the portal's own churn: a new API version in 2023, new three-letter variable codes, and a 2026 fix decoding pages as windows-1252 because the server declares UTF-8 but emits Latin-1. In June 2026 it added a ThingsBoard integration, then extended it to self-hosted instances two days later.
The package is repositioning from a data-access library into the first half of a monitoring pipeline. 0.6.0 shipped push helpers, device discovery and cleanup, an importable dashboard and a GitHub Actions workflow; 0.7.0 immediately generalised the authentication so it works against self-hosted Community Edition rather than only the Cloud tier, and lifted the push from a five-station demo to the entire groundwater archive. The hardening detail in 0.7.0 — retries on 5xx, warnings when only one of two credentials is set — reads like a maintainer who has run this against a real deployment.
The obvious next step is extending the ThingsBoard path to the surface water stations, which the package has flagged as under-supported since 0.1.0. The entries show no other direction under construction.
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 shapviz or wasserportal.
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 shapviz alternatives → · See all wasserportal alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. shapviz and wasserportal 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. shapviz and wasserportal 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 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.
Top wasserportal alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "wasserportal alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/wasserportal for the full list with editorial commentary on each.