How to Generate an Analysis Summary for Variables, Tables, or Charts

Sometimes you might have related outputs, and you'd like to quickly gain insights from them in context with one another. Or, you might have a table that has so many rows or columns, it would take a while to find useful insights. You can automatically generate a summary of your outputs in Displayr using Research Agent via the Add Commentary feature or another method.

If you have Displayr AI enabled, you can create a summary of selected outputs or variables that can be set to automatically update. If you choose not to enable Displayr AI, you can still use our built-in feature to create an analysis summary, but it won't automatically update if your data changes. This article covers three methods of interpreting outputs:

Method - Summarize data using Research Agent (recommended)

Method - Create a Custom AI output to Summarize

Method - Create a basic Analysis Summary without AI

This article will walk you through using a table or chart like so:

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to produce an analysis summary. For example, with AI-enabled, the summary would be similar to:

Without AI-enabled, you would see an analysis summary similar to:

Requirements

A Displayr document with at least one table or visualization.
You must have Displayr AI enabled for the first two methods, the AI-based method. See Opting In and Out of Displayr AI.

Method - Summarize data using Research Agent

Typically, you use Research Agent to automatically analyze input variables and create reports and outputs for you to review. You can also use Research Agent to interpret and summarize one or more outputs that are already created. To do this:

Select the outputs that you want Research Agent to create a summary for. This can be an entire Page in the Report tree or a selection of outputs in the Report or on a Page.
Right-click and select one of the following:
1. Add Commentary to generate a text box with a hardcoded interpretation of the outputs. You can also generate a preview of the commentary by selecting the object and hovering over Commentary Preview before adding it to your page.
2. Add Auto-updating Commentary to generate an AI widget that can update the summary if outputs update.
3. Synthesize Key Findings to generate an executive summary of the selected pages. Note, you have to select at least two pages to use this option.
A Your analysis goals window will pop up with the prompt used the last time you ran Research Agent or the default prompt if not used before. This window adds context for your study for Research Agent to use when interpreting the outputs you have selected. You can modify the default prompt, or create your own from scratch if you want. See Best Practices for Using Research Agent and Getting Started with AI Prompting in Displayr for tips.
Click Continue.
An output with the interpretation will be created.
[Optional]: If you have an Auto-updating commentary, you may want to uncheck Calculate automatically in the output's Properties if you want to manually control when the interpretation updates instead of whenever one of the outputs it is based on is modified.
[Optional]: Because Auto-updating commentary is a calculation/widget and not a basic text box, if you want to edit the text, you should right-click and select Copy > Copy data and Ctrl+V to paste it into a text box for editing.

Method - Create a Custom AI output to Summarize

You can quickly summarize outputs using the Research Agent and the Add Commentary feature, but sometimes you may want to write your own custom prompt to provide more specific summary requirements and guidelines. In this case, you can use our Custom AI feature. When using this feature, you will write a prompt and specify which table(s) or visualization(s) to use as inputs to summarize. See Using Customizable Displayr AI Features for more details. Have a look at Getting Started with AI Prompting in Displayr for ideas about how to write AI prompts that will give you more useful outputs.

Go to a Page in your Report where you want to place the summary.
From the toolbar, go to Calculation > Custom AI.
Click on the page to place the output.
In the Custom AI Prompt editor pane that opens, enter a prompt that describes how you'd like AI to summarize the output and a reference to the outputs' Name(s). You can include the specific output by clicking on the reference name of an object on a page that appears just above the object when you hover over it, or the plus that appears on the item in the Report or Data Sources pane. See How to Use Point and Click Inside R Code to see more details about the ways that you can reference items in the prompt.
Click outside of the prompt (anywhere on your page is fine) to run the prompt.
Because this output is a calculation/widget and not a basic text box, if you want to edit the text, you should right-click and select Copy > Copy data and Ctrl+V to paste it into a text box for editing.

Method - Create a basic Analysis Summary without AI

If you don't have AI enabled on your Displayr account, you can use the Analysis Summary feature, but this can only be used on built-in drag-and-drop tables. This feature summarizes the most statistically significant results that are relatively high or low. The Analysis Summary is a static text box, which cannot be updated. If your data changes, you will need to delete the existing analysis summary output and start at Step 1 again.