Publications by Markus Gesmann

Early bird registration for R in Insurance ends tomorrow

29.05.2014

The early bird registration offer for the 2nd R in Insurance conference, 14 July 2014, at Cass Business School ends tomorrow.This one-day conference will focus once more on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca for statistical computation. Topics covered include reserving, pricing, loss modellin...

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The joy of joining data.tables

09.06.2014

The example I present here is a little silly, yet it illustrates how to join tables with data.table in R. Mapping old data to new dataCategories in general are never fixed, they always change at some point. And then the trouble starts with the data. For example not that long ago we didn't distinguish between smartphones and dumbphones...

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Who will win the World Cup and which prediction model?

17.06.2014

The World Cup has finally kicked off last Thursday and I have seen some fantastic games already. Perhaps the Netherlands appears to be the strongest side so far, following their 5-1 victory over Spain. To me the question is not only which country will win the World Cup, but also which prediction model will come closest to the actual ...

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Generating and visualising multivariate random numbers in R

24.06.2014

This post will present the wonderful pairs.panels function of the psych package [1] that I discovered recently to visualise multivariate random numbers.Here is a little example with a Gaussian copula and normal and log-normal marginal distributions. I use pairs.panels to illustrate the steps along the way.I start with standardised mul...

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Last chance to register for the R in Insurance conference

30.06.2014

The registration for the 2nd R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School London will close this Friday, 4 July. The programme includes talks from international practitioners and leading academics, see below. For more details and registration visit: http://www.rininsurance.com. Still unsure? Review some impressions and presentations from las...

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googleVis 0.5.3 released

08.07.2014

Recently we released googleVis 0.5.3 on CRAN. The package provides an interface between R and Google Charts, allowing you to create interactive web charts from R.Screen shot of some of the Google ChartsAlthough this is mainly a maintenance release, I’d like to point out two changes: Default chart width is set to ‘automatic’ inst...

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Simple user interface in R to get login details

15.07.2014

Occasionally I have to connect to services from R that ask for login details, such as databases. I don’t like to store my login details in the R source code file, instead I would prefer to enter the my login details when I execute the code.Fortunately, I found some old code in a post by Barry Rowlingson that does just that. It uses ...

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Notes from the 2nd R in Insurance Conference

22.07.2014

The 2nd R in Insurance conference took place last Monday, 14 July, at Cass Business School London. This one-day conference focused once more on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R. Topics covered included reserving, pricing, loss modelling, the use of R in a production environment and more. In the first plenary ...

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Hit and run. Think Bayes!

29.07.2014

At the R in Insurance conference Arthur Charpentier gave a great keynote talk on Bayesian modelling in R. Bayes' theorem on conditional probabilities is strikingly simple, yet incredibly thought provoking. Here is an example from Daniel Kahneman to test your intuition. But first I have to start with Bayes' theorem.Bayes' theoremBayes' theorem sta...

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Thanks to R Markdown: Perhaps Word is an option after all?

05.08.2014

In many cases Word is still the preferred file format for collaboration in the office. Yet, it is often a challenge to work with it, not so much because of the software, but how it is used and abused. Thanks to Markdown it is no longer painful to include mathematical notations and R output into Word. I have been using R Markdown for a...

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