How to add arguments from kable() in modelsummary() with output as kableExtra

Question

I recently discovered R package modelsummary from answer to this question. It appears that the output of summary table created by modelsummary can be of class kable_knitr which can be fed into other functions from kableExtra, such as kable_styling.

However, I am stuck at how to specify values for other options from the function kable() into the modelsummary() function. One obvious way could be to get a data.frame output and than input that into kable. Is there a better alternative (so that I can avoid fixing the data.frame output?

I am particularly looking for kable() options, escape=F (to insert greek letters in latex output - see this) and booktabs=T.

A reproducable example:

x=rnorm(100)
mod1=arima(x,order = c(1,0,1))
modelsummary(mod1, output = 'kableExtra', coef_rename = c('ar1'='$x_{t-1}$', 
                                                           'ma1'='$\\epsilon_{t-1}$')) %>% 
  kable_styling(latex_options = 'HOLD_position')

In the above table, I am trying to rename the variables to math style, which would work in kable() if the names were given as they have been.

Answer 1

The ... ellipses are pushed forward to the kbl function automatically. Valid arguments like escape can be passed directly to modelsummary.

Note that for the reasons explained in the "post-processing" note of the output argument documentation, I prefer to specify directly what output format I need before post-processing functions, otherwise kableExtra will prep an HTML table by default:

library(kableExtra)
library(modelsummary)
x=rnorm(100)
mod1=arima(x,order = c(1,0,1))

modelsummary(
  mod1, 
  output = "latex",
  coef_rename = c('ar1'='$x_{t-1}$', 'ma1'='$\\epsilon_{t-1}$'),
  escape = FALSE)

\begin{table}[H]
\centering
\begin{tabular}[t]{lc}
\toprule
  & Model 1\\
\midrule
$x_{t-1}$ & 0.337\\
 & (0.368)\\
$\epsilon_{t-1}$ & -0.490\\
 & (0.335)\\
intercept & 0.007\\
 & (0.068)\\
\midrule
Num.Obs. & 100\\
AIC & 267.6\\
BIC & 278.0\\
Log.Lik. & -129.808\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

Also note that modelsummary already calls kable_styling once internally, and that adding kable_styling to a latex table produced by kableExtra can sometimes produce weird results because kableExtra will nest tables within tables. (Note: I plan to submit a bugfix to kableExtra about this.)

data.frame(a = 1:2, b = 2:3) %>%
  kbl("latex") %>%
  kable_styling() %>% 
  kable_styling() %>%
  kable_styling()

\begin{table}[H]
\centering\begin{table}[H]
\centering\begin{table}[H]
\centering
\begin{tabular}[t]{r|r}
\hline
a & b\\
\hline
1 & 2\\
\hline
2 & 3\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{table}
\end{table}