Publications by Markus Gesmann
Submit a talk for the first R in Insurance conference
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 conference in Spain. Thus, if you come from overseas to Spain, why not stop in London on y...
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ChainLadder 0.1.5-6 released on CRAN
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...
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Top 10 tips to get started with R
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 install additional packages, how to access the history, how to use auto completion and open the help...
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Next Kölner R User Meeting: 12 April 2013
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 R user group meeting are available here.Thanks also to ...
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How to set axis options in googleVis
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 API, which uses a JavaScript syntax. In googleVis chart options are set via a list in th...
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Test Driven Analysis?
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 thought provoking. It asked for the definition of the following term:Test-driven ...
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Review: Kölner R Meeting 12 April 2013
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.ShinyDiego gave an overview of the design princi...
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How to change the alpha value of colours in R
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, e.g. a RColorBrewer palette, using col2rgb and rgb, which has an argument for alpha,...
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R in Insurance: Programme and Abstracts published
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 industry, covering: PricingReservingData miningCapital modellingAutomate reportingCatastrophe modellingHi...
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Claims Inflation – a known unknown
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 challenge is to define what inflation, or indeed claims inflation actually is and ho...
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