Publications by arthur charpentier

Please, never use my codes without checking twice (at least)!

09.10.2013

I wanted to get back on some interesting experience, following a discussion I had with Carlos after my class, this morning. Let me simplify the problem, and change also the dataset. Consider the following dataset > db = read.table("http://freakonometrics.free.fr/db2.txt",header=TRUE,sep=";") Let me change also one little thing (in the course, we ...

4029 sym R (2973 sym/18 pcs) 6 img

Generating your own normal distribution table

15.10.2013

It might sounds incredibly old fashion, but for my the exam for the ACT2121 probability course (to prepare for the exam P of the Society of Actuaries), I will provide a standard normal distribution table. The problem is that it is never the one we’re looking for (sometimes it is the survival function, sometimes it is the cumulative distributio...

1716 sym R (6871 sym/5 pcs) 4 img

Equidistant points on a map

17.10.2013

This morning, I had a comment on a recent post, regarding a graph I did upload on the blog, which was extracted from a paper now online (see http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00871883). Jo (from KUL, I guess I can share that piece of information) asked me I was wondering whether you would want to share the R code for plotting figures 1 and 14? ...

2895 sym R (2910 sym/16 pcs) 12 img

GLM, non-linearity and heteroscedasticity

22.10.2013

Last week in non-life insurance course, we’ve seen the theory of the Generalized Linear Models, emphasizing the two important components the link function (which is actually the key component in predictive modeling) the distribution, or the variance function Just to illustrate, consider my favorite dataset ­lin.mod = lm(dist~speed,data=cars...

2073 sym R (1634 sym/5 pcs) 26 img

Pricing Reinsurance Contracts

24.10.2013

In order to illustrate the next section of the non-life insurance course, consider the following example1, inspired from http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/…. This is the so-called “Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States” dataset, for the period 1900-2005, from Pielke et al. (2008). The dataset is available in xls format, so we h...

3749 sym R (4304 sym/19 pcs) 14 img

More significant? so what…

30.10.2013

Following my non-life insurance class, this morning, I had an interesting question from a student, that I will try to illustrate, and reformulate as accurately as possible. Consider a simple regression model, with one variable of interest, and one possible explanatory variable. Assume that we have two possible models, with the following output (y...

4247 sym R (2345 sym/9 pcs) 14 img

Halloween and candies (a ballot problem)

30.10.2013

This year, for Halloween, a post on candies (I promise, next year I will write another post on zombies). But I don’t want to focus on the kids problems (last year, we tried to minimize their walking distance to collect as much candies as possible, with part 1 and part 2), I want to discuss my own problems. Because usually, the kids wear the...

5299 sym R (1019 sym/6 pcs) 54 img

Smoothing mortality rates

04.11.2013

This morning, I was working with Julie, a student of mine, coming from Rennes, on mortality tables. Actually, we work on genealogical datasets from a small region in Québec, and we can observe a lot of volatiliy. If I borrow one of her graph, we get something like Since we have some missing data, we wanted to use some Generalized Nonlinear Mode...

2131 sym R (2678 sym/8 pcs) 26 img

Generating functions

08.11.2013

Today, I wanted to publish a post on generating functions, based on discussions I had with Jean-Francois while having our coffee after lunch a couple of times already. The other reason is that I publish my post while my student just finished their Probability exam (and there were a few questions on generating functions). A short introduction (ba...

9786 sym R (2010 sym/20 pcs) 224 img

Maximum Likelihood versus Goodness of Fit

08.11.2013

Thursday, I got an interesting question from a colleague of mine (JP). I mean, the way I understood the question turned out to be a nice puzzle (but I have to confess I might have misunderstood). The question is the following : consider a i.i.d. sample of continuous variables. We would like to choose between two (parametric) families for the dis...

3626 sym R (1851 sym/8 pcs) 28 img