mages' blog

Every year the UK’s general insurance actuarial community organises a big conference, which they call GIRO, short for General Insurance Research Organising committee.

This year's conference is in Brussels from 18 - 21 September 2012. Despite the fact that Brussels is actually in Belgium the UK actuaries will travel all the way to enjoy good beer and great talks.

On Wednesday morning I will run a session on Using R in insurance. It would be great to see some of you there.


I prepared the slides with R, RStudio, knitr, pandoc and slidy again. My title page shows a word cloud about the GIRO conference. It uses the wordcloud package and was inspired by Ian Fellows' post on FellStats.

The last slide shows the output of sessionInfo(). I am sure it will become helpful one day, when I have to remind myself how I actually created the slides and which packages and versions I used.

Today I feel very lucky, as I have been invited to the Royal Statistical Society conference to give a tutorial on interactive web graphs with R and googleVis.

I prepared my slides with RStudio, knitr, pandoc and slidy, similar to my Cambridge R talk. You can access the RSS slides online here and you find the original R-Markdown file on github. You will notice some HTML code in the file, which I had to use to overcome my knowledge gaps of Markdown or its limitations. However, my output format will always be HTML, so that should be ok. To convert the Rmd-file into a HTML slidy presentation execute the following statements on the command line:

Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('googleVis_at_RSS_2012.Rmd')"
pandoc -s -S -i -t slidy --mathjax googleVis_at_RSS_2012.md 
  -o googleVis_at_RSS_2012.html

Tonight I will give a talk at the Cambridge R user group about googleVis. Following my good experience with knitr and RStudio to create interactive reports, I thought that I should try to create the slides in the same way as well.

Christopher Gandrud's recent post reminded me of deck.js, a JavaScript library for interactive html slides, which I have used in the past, but as Christopher experienced, it is currently not that straightforward to use with R and knitr.

Thus, I decided to try slidy in combination with knitr and pandoc. And it worked nicely.

I used RStudio again to edit my Rmd-file and knitr to generate the Markdown md-file output. Following this I run pandoc on the command line to convert the md-file into a single slidy html-file:

pandoc -s -S -i -t slidy --mathjax Cambridge_R_googleVis_with_knitr_and_RStudio_May_2012.md -o Cambridge_R_googleVis_with_knitr_and_RStudio_May_2012.html

Et volià, here is the result:

Addition (2 June 2012)

Oh boy, knitr and Markdown are hitting a nail. With slidify by Ramnath Vaidyanathan another project sprung up to ease the creation of web presentations.