scheduleR is an attempt to create an intuitive interface for scheduling R and Rmarkdown scripts. Especially for the latter, I find the lack of a good scheduling, logging and notification tool the reason for why I don’t use Rmarkdown as much as I could for generating business report / dashboards. ... [Read more...]

It was very clear that the performance of the first simmer version was lagging behind. The 2.0 release introduces a C++ based engine and comes with a significant performance boost versus the previous version. While the performance can always be further improved I’m currently quite satisfied with it. Future refinement ... [Read more...]

In current times data is everywhere. The big challenge however is making it not only available, but also accessible to those who need it. An example of this is the Hospital Minimal Data (Belgium). This dataset is openly published by the Federal Public Service for Health, Food Chain Safety & Environment. ... [Read more...]

Credit scoring is the practice of analysing a persons background and credit application in order to assess the creditworthiness of the person. One can take numerous approaches on analysing this creditworthiness. In the end it basically comes down to first selecting the correct independent variables (e.g. income, age, gender) ... [Read more...]

Business dashboards are available in many shapes and sizes. Business dashboards are useful to create an overview of key performance indicators (KPIs) important for the business strategy and/or operations. There are many flavours of dashboard frameworks and apps available, ranging in price from thousands of dollars to open-source implementations. ... [Read more...]

Genetic algorithm is a search heuristic. GAs can generate a vast number of possible model solutions and use these to evolve towards an approximation of the best solution of the model. Hereby it mimics evolution in nature. GA generates a population, the individuals in this population (often called chromosomes) have  ... [Read more...]

The OECD collects (among a lot of other statistics) information on the number of hospitals and hospital beds per country. These two parameters combined and its evolution over the years could give an indication on whether or not the country’s hospital landscape is evolving towards large medical centers, small ... [Read more...]

Estimating required hospital bed capacity requires a thorough analysis. There are a lot of ways of approaching a capacity requirement problem, but I think we can agree that a simple spreadsheet analysis just won't cut it. The approach described in this post makes use of discrete-event simulation and, just ... [Read more...]

R has great support for Holt-Winter filtering and forecasting. I sometimes use this functionality, HoltWinter & predict.HoltWinter, to forecast demand figures based on historical data. Using the HoltWinter functions in R is pretty straightforward. Let's say our dataset looks as follows; demand [Read more...]

First of all, a shout out to R-bloggers for adding my feed to their website! Linear programming is a valuable instrument when it comes to decision making. This post shows how R in conjunction with the lpSolveAPI package, can be used to build a linear programming model and to analyse  ... [Read more...]

Discrete-event simulation is a very useful tool when it comes to simulating alternative scenario’s for current of future business operations. Let’s take the following case; Patients of an outpatient diabetes clinic are complaining about long waiting times, this seems to have an adverse effect on patient satisfaction and ... [Read more...]

This post shows how to create a timeline graph by using ggplot2. Let’s start by loading the ggplot2 library. Next let’s create a dataset which we will use to feed the graph. In the last column (y), I create random positive values for the first three rows (which ... [Read more...]

Welcome to this demo of how R code and results can be combined into an HTML report. This entire blogpost was generated by using a combination of R, knitr and markdown. Beforehand, make sure you have the following libraries installed (latest version); knitr markdown ggplot2 (to run the example script)  ... [Read more...]