Auto-magic Package Development

rstudio::conf 2020 programming

Alicia Schep

January 31, 2020

Vega-lite is a high-level grammar of interactive graphics implemented in Javascript; it renders interactive visualizations in the browser based on a JSON specification. In Python and Javascript, the Altair and vega-lite-api packages have demonstrated how the development of APIs to build Vega-Lite graphics can be partially automated based on the Vega-Lite JSON schema, which describes the required format for a Vega-Lite JSON specification. This talk will describe the development of the ‘vlbuildr’ package for building Vega-Lite specifications in R and the ‘vlmetabuildr’ package for building the ‘vlbuildr’ package. The ‘vlbuildr’ package seeks to provide a pipe-friendly, “R-like” functional interface for building up simple to complex specifications for Vega-Lite graphics, which can in turn be rendered as an HtmlWidget by the ‘vegawidget’ R package. Building such an API in a fully automated way from the Vega-Lite schema presents considerable challenges, so the approach taken here was to rely on partial automation. Human judgement dictates the basic contours of the API, such as what groups of functions to include and how various types of building blocks will go together. The part that is automated is filling in many details such as the different variants of a group of functions, the exact parameters needed for each function, and the documentation of those parameters -- the parts that would be extremely tedious to port over!

About the speaker

Alicia Schep

Alicia is a data scientist at Outlier AI. She has been working with R and developing R packages for many years, starting when she was a PhD student in Genetics working on new bioinformatics methods for understanding gene regulation. She is very interested in interactive visualizations as a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis.