rtables -- A Framework For Creating Complex Structured Reporting Tables Via Multi-Level Faceted Computations

TL;DR

rtables is a framework and software tool that enables the declarative creation, rendering, and manipulation of complex, multi-level structured tables for data analysis and reporting, integrating with the grammar of graphics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel conceptual framework and implementation for defining and working with complex tables within the grammar of graphics paradigm, relaxing traditional constraints.

Findings

Facilitates intuitive declaration of complex tables

Supports powerful post-creation table queries and manipulations

Demonstrates practical application with realistic examples

Abstract

Tables form a central component in both exploratory data analysis and formal reporting procedures across many industries. These tables are often complex in their conceptual structure and in the computations that generate their individual cell values. We introduce both a conceptual framework and a reference implementation for declaring, generating, rendering and modeling such tables. We place tables within the existing grammar of graphics paradigm for general statistical visualizations. Our open source `rtables` software implementation utilizes these connections to facilitate an intuitive way to declare complex table structure and construct those tables from data. In the course of this work, we relax several constraints present in the traditional grammar of graphics framing. Finally, `rtables` models instantiated tables as tree structures, which allows powerful, semantically meaningful and self-describing queries and manipulations of tables after creation. We showcase our framework in practice by creating complex, realistic example tables.