mages' blog

Flowing triangles

I have admired the work of the artist Bridget Riley for a long time. She is now in her eighties, but as it seems still very creative and productive. Some of her recent work combines simple triangles in fascinating compositions. The longer I look at them, the more patterns I recognise.

Yet, the actual painting can be explained easily, in a sense of a specification document to reproduce the pattern precisely. However, seeing the real print, as I had the chance at the London Art Fair last week, and a reproduction on the screen is incommensurable.

Having said that, I could not resist programming a figure that resembles the artwork labelled Bagatelle 2. Well, at least I can say that I learned more about grid [1], grid.path [2] and gridSVG [3] in R.

R Code

References

[1] P. Murrell. R Graphics, Second Edition. CRC Press. 2011
[2] P. Murrell. What's in a Name? . The R Journal, 4(2):5–12, dec 2012.
[3] P. Murrell and S. Potter. gridSVG: Export grid graphics as SVG. R package 1.5-0. 2015

Session Info

R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11.2 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils  datasets 
[7] methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] gridSVG_1.5-0    data.table_1.9.6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.2.3   RJSONIO_1.3-0 chron_2.3-47  XML_3.98-1.3

Formatting table output in R

Formatting data for output in a table can be a bit of a pain in R. The package formattable by Kun Ren and Kenton Russell provides some intuitive functions to create good looking tables for the R console or HTML quickly. The package home page demonstrates the functions with illustrative examples nicely.

There are a few points I really like:

• the functions accounting, currency, percent transform numbers into better human readable output
  
• cells can be highlighted by adding color information
• contextual icons can be added, e.g. from Glyphicons
• output can be displayed in RStudio's viewer pane

The CRAN Task View: Reproducible Research lists other packages as well that help to create tables for web output, such as compareGroups, DT, htmlTable, HTMLUtils, hwriter, Kmisc, knitr, lazyWeave, SortableHTMLTables, texreg and ztable. Yet, if I am not mistaken, most of these packages focus more on generating complex tables with multi-columns rows, footnotes, math notation, etc, than the points I mentioned above.

Finally, here is a little formattable example from my side:

Session Info

R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11.2 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[7] base     

other attached packages:
[1] formattable_0.1.5

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] shiny_0.12.2.9006 htmlwidgets_0.5.1 R6_2.1.1         
 [4] rsconnect_0.3.79  markdown_0.7.7    htmltools_0.3    
 [7] tools_3.2.3       yaml_2.1.13       Rcpp_0.12.2      
[10] highr_0.5.1       knitr_1.12        jsonlite_0.9.19  
[13] digest_0.6.9      xtable_1.8-0      httpuv_1.3.3     
[16] mime_0.4  

R in Insurance: Registration and abstract submission opened

Following the successful 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam last year, we return to London this year.

The registration for the 4th conference on R in Insurance on Monday 11 July 2016 at Cass Business School has opened.

This one-day conference will focus again on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca for statistical computation.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

Invited talks will be given by:

• Mario V. Wüthrich, RiskLab, Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich.
• Dan Murphy, President, Trinostics LLC.

Details about the registration and abstract submission are given on the dedicated R in Insurance page at Cass Business School, London.

The submission deadline for abstracts is 28 March 2016. Please email your abstract of no more than 300 words to: rinsuranceconference@gmail.com.

Attendance of the whole conference is the equivalent of 6.5 hours of CPD for members of the Actuarial Profession.

For more information about the past events visit www.rininsurance.com.

Sponsors

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Verisk/ISO, Mirai Solutions, RStudio, Applied AI, and CYBAEA.

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors