Publications by R on mages' blog
Non-linear growth curves with Stan
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 is taken from OpenBUGS. The data describes ...
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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 o...
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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 straightfo...
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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 l...
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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 ...
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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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