Staying on top of new CRAN packages is quite a challenge nowadays. However, thanks to Dirk’s CRANberries service I occasionally spot a new gem, such as wbstats, which appeared on CRAN last week. Similarly to the WDI package, wbstats offers an interface to the World Bank database. With the ... [Read more...]

Last Friday the 2nd Bayesian Mixer Meetup (@BayesianMixer) took place at Cass Business School, thanks to Pietro Millossovich and Andreas Tsanakas, who helped to organise the event. Bayesian Mixer at Cass First up was Davide De March talking about the c... [Read more...]

Hurry! The abstract submission deadline for the 4th R in Insurance conference in London, 11 July 2016 is approaching soon. You have until the 28th of March to submit a one-page abstract for consideration. Both academic and practitioner proposals relate... [Read more...]

Last Friday the Cologne R user group came together for the 17th time. This time, we were in for a special treatment, with two talks by psychologists! But, there was nothing to fear, we were in safe hands, and for the first time, we met at the new Micro... [Read more...]

The 17th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 26 February 2016. We have two talks, followed by networking drinks. Introduction to Bayesian Regression Models using Stan with the brms package - Paul-Christian Bürkner (Uni Münster)... [Read more...]

We had our first successful Bayesian Mixer Meetup last Friday night at the Artillery Arms! We expected about 15 - 20 people to turn up, when we booked the function room overlooking Bunhill Cemetery and Bayes’ grave. Now, looking at the photos taken during the evening, it seems that our prior believe ... [Read more...]

My traditional work flow for embedding R graphics into a blog post has been via a PNG files that I upload online. However, when I created a ‘simple’ graphic with only basic curves and triangles for a recent post, I noticed that the PNG output didn’t look as crisp ... [Read more...]

There is a nice pub between Bunhill Fields and the Royal Statistical Society in London: The Artillery Arms. Clearly, the perfect place to bring people together to talk about Bayesian Statistics. Well, that’s what Jon Sedar (@jonsedar, applied.ai) and I thought. Source: http://www.artillery-arms.co.uk/Hence, ... [Read more...]

I have admired the work of the artist Bridget Riley for a long time. She is now in her eighties, but as it seems still very creative and productive. Some of her recent work combines simple triangles in fascinating compositions. The longer I look at the... [Read more...]

Formatting data for output in a table can be a bit of a pain in R. The package formattable by Kun Ren and Kenton Russell provides some intuitive functions to create good looking tables for the R console or HTML quickly. The package home page demonstrat... [Read more...]

Following the successful 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam last year, we return to London this year. The registration for the 4th conference on R in Insurance on Monday 11 July 2016 at Cass Business School has opened. This one-day conference w... [Read more...]

The 16th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 4 December 2015 and we have great line up with three talks followed by networking drinks. Monitoring process change using Bayesian methods (Mick Cooney) A common business problem is to... [Read more...]

I had the great pleasure time to attend the Warsaw R meetup last Thursday. The organisers Olga Mierzwa and Przemyslaw Biecek had put together an event with a focus on R in Insurance (btw, there is a conference with the same name), discussing examples of pricing and reserving in general ... [Read more...]

I continue with the growth curve model for loss reserving from last week’s post. Today, following the ideas of James Guszcza [2] I will add an hierarchical component to the model, by treating the ultimate loss cost of an accident year as a random effect. Initially, I will use the ... [Read more...]

Last week I posted a biological example of fitting a non-linear growth curve with Stan/RStan. Today, I want to apply a similar approach to insurance data using ideas by David Clark [1] and James Guszcza [2]. Instead of predicting the growth of dugongs ... [Read more...]

I suppose the go to tool for fitting non-linear models in R is nls of the stats package. In this post I will show an alternative approach with Stan/RStan, as illustrated in the example, Dugongs: “nonlinear growth curve”, that is part of Stan’s documentation. The original example itself ... [Read more...]

Following the successful 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam this year, we will return to London next year. We will be back at Cass Business School, 11 July 2016. The event will focus again on the use of R in insurance, bringing together experts... [Read more...]

We released version 0.2.2 of ChainLadder a few weeks ago. This version adds back the functionality to estimate the index parameter for the compound Poisson model in glmReserve using the cplm package by Wayne Zhang. Ok, what does this all mean? I will r... [Read more...]

Last Friday the Cologne R user group came together for the 15th time. Since its inception over three years ago the group evolved from a small gathering in a pub into an active data science community, covering wider topics than just R. Still, R is the link and clue between ... [Read more...]

The 15th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 18 September 2015 and we have a full agenda with three talks followed by networking drinks. R in big data pipeline with luigi (Yuki Katoh) R in big data pipeline: Put your awesome R co... [Read more...]