I was trained as a mathematician and it was only last year, when I attended the Royal Statistical Society conference and met many statisticians that I understood how different the two groups are. In mathematics you often start with some axioms, things...
Over the last year I worked with two colleagues of mine on the subject of inflation and claims inflation in particular. I didn't expect it to be such a challenging topic, but we ended up with more questions than answers. The key question and biggest ch...
I am delighted to announce that the programme and abstracts for the first R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School in London, 15 July 2013, have been published. The conference committee received strong abstracts from academia and the indust...
Often I like to reduce the alpha value (level of transparency) of colours to identify patterns of over-plotting when displaying lots of data points with R. So, here is a tiny function that allows me to add an alpha value to a given vector of colours, ...
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 schni...
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...
Setting axis options in googleVis charts can be a bit tricky. Here I present two examples where I set several options to customise the layout of a line and combo chart with two axes. The parameters have to be set in line with the Google Chart Tools A...
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...
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 inst...
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 a...
