Publications by Markus Gesmann
Loss Developments via Growth Curves and Stan
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 (sea cows), I would like to predict the growth of cumulative insurance loss payments ...
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Hierarchical Loss Reserving with Stan
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 nlme R package, just as James did in his paper, and t...
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Notes from Warsaw R meetup
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 and life insurance.Experience vs. DataI kicked of...
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Next Kölner R User Meeting: Friday, 4 December 2015
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 evaluate the effect of a change of process, and this talk will discuss a straightforward approa...
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R in Insurance: Registration and abstract submission opened
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 will focus again on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca ...
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Formatting table output in R
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 demonstrates the functions with illustrative examples nicely.There are a few points I really l...
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Flowing triangles
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 them, the more patterns I recognise. Yet, the actual painting can be explained easily, ...
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First Bayesian Mixer Meeting in London
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, we’d like to organise ...
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Using SVG graphics in blog posts
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 as I expected it to be. So, eventually I used a SVG (scalable vect...
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Bayesian Mixer on Meetup
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 was pretty good.The event starte...
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