Our 5th Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended meeting so far, with 20 members finding their way to the Institute of Sociology for two talks by Diego de Castillo on shiny and Stephan Holtmeier on cluster analysis, followed by beer and schnitzel at the Lux, a gastropub nearby.... [Read more...]

At the last LondonR meeting Francine Bennett from Mastodon C shared some of her experience and findings from an analysis of a large prescriptions data set of the UK's national health service (NHS). However, it was her last slide, which I found the most... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 April 2013. We will discuss cluster analysis and shiny. Further details and the agenda are available on our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from the last Cologne ... [Read more...]

Be motivated. R has a steep learning curve. Find a problem you can't solve otherwise. E.g. plotting multivariate data, a statistical analysis for which an R function exists already. Download and install R. Get to know the R console. Learn how to instal... [Read more...]

Last week we released version 0.1.5-6 of the ChainLadder package on CRAN. The ChainLadder package provides statistical models, which are typically used for the estimation of outstanding claims reserves in general insurance. The package vignette gives an overview of the package functionality. Output of plot(MackChainLadder(GenIns)) Since the last ... [Read more...]

The registration for the first R in Insurance is open and there is still time to submit a talk / lightning talk.The conference will take place at Cass Business School in London on Monday, 15 July 2013. This is the Monday following the useR! 2013 confer... [Read more...]

The new version of googleVis 0.4.2 is now available via CRAN. Many thanks to all who provided feedback on version 0.4.0 and particularly to Sebastian Campbell, John Maindonald and Aonan Zhang. As usual, if you find any issues or bugs, please send us an email or add a line to our online ... [Read more...]

A friend of mine asked me the other day how she could use the function optim in R to fit data. Of course there are functions for fitting data in R and I wrote about this earlier. However, she wanted to understand how to do this from scratch using optim. ... [Read more...]

Documenting code can be a bit of a pain. Yet, the older (and wiser?) I get, the more I realise how important it is. When I was younger I said 'documentation is for people without talent'. Well, I am clearly loosing my talent, as I sometimes struggle to understand what ... [Read more...]

The guys at RStudio have done a fantastic job with shiny. It is really easy to build web apps with R using shiny. With the help of Joe Cheng from RStudio we figured out a way to make googleVis work on shiny as well. This allows you to make use ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Lloyd's of London is looking for a Data Scientist as part of the Analysis team. See Lloyd's career web site for more details. [Read more...]

The fourth Cologne R user meeting took place last Wednesday at the Institute of Sociology. Thanks to Bernd Weiß for hosting the event and Revolution Analytics for their sponsorship. We had two fantastic talks by Klaus Jacobi and M.eik Michalke. Klaus talked about Eliminating cloud pixels in satellite images ... [Read more...]

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, 6 February 2013. All details and the agenda are available on the KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from the last Cologne R user group meeting are available here. Thanks ... [Read more...]

A friend of mine told me the secret of making money at the stock market. "It's easy", he said.All I would have to do is to buy a big jar of ants. Then I should observe the ants movement on my kitchen table, while following the stock market. I ... [Read more...]

This is the third post about Christofides' paper on Regression models based on log-incremental payments [1]. The first post covered the fundamentals of Christofides' reserving model in sections A - F, the second focused on a more realistic example and model reduction of sections G - K. Today's post will wrap ... [Read more...]

Following on from last week's post I will continue to go through the paper Regression models based on log-incremental payments by Stavros Christofides [1]. In the previous post I introduced the model from the first 15 pages up to section F. Today I will progress with sections G to K which illustrate ... [Read more...]

A recent post on the PirateGrunt blog on claims reserving inspired me to look into the paper Regression models based on log-incremental payments by Stavros Christofides [1], published as part of the Claims Reserving Manual (Version 2) of the Institute of Actuaries.The paper is available together with a spread sheet model, ... [Read more...]

I really like gists as a quick way to include more lengthly code snippets into my blog posts. However, I am not a git user as such, and so I was quite concerned when I noticed that all my gists on this blog had vanished after Christmas. I suppose this ... [Read more...]