mages' blog

Notes from the 3rd R in Insurance Conference

Photo: Arthur Charpentier

The R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam was a sold out success! Congratulations to the organising committee at the University of Amsterdam, and many thanks to our sponsors:

Milliman, RStudio, CYBAEA, Deloitte, a.s.r., Triple A Risk Finance, AEGON, Delta Lloyd Amsterdam, QBE Re and APPLIED AI

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.

Next summer we are back in London at Cass Business School.

The slides are now available from the links in the agenda below.

MacBook Air battery replacement

After four years of daily use our MacBook Air informed us that it needed a battery replacement. That's kind of nice to know, in particular as it still feels speedy and otherwise just works.

A new battery isn't that expensive and according to iFixit it appeared to be quite easy to replace it. I needn't to worry, it was actually super simple, given appropriate tools:

• Remove 10 screws from bottom case
• Open case
• Disconnect battery
• Remove 5 screws from battery
• Swap battery
• Reassemble everything back together
• Job done.

Although I cannot guarantee that it works for you as well, I would do it again.

Here are a few pictures of the surgery:

Lower case with screws removed

Old battery pack

New battery pack

ChainLadder 0.2.1 released

Over the weekend we released version 0.2.1 of the ChainLadder package for claims reserving on CRAN.

New Features

• New function PaidIncurredChain by Fabio Concina, based on the 2010 Merz & Wüthrich paper Paid-incurred chain claims reserving method
• Functions plot.MackChainLadder and plot.BootChainLadder gained new argument which, allowing users to specify which sub-plot to display. Thanks to Christophe Dutang for this suggestion.

Output of plot(MackChainLadder(MW2014, est.sigma="Mack"), which=3:6)

Changes

• Updated NAMESPACE file to comply with new R CMD checks in R-3.3.0
• Removed package dependencies on grDevices and Hmisc
• Expanded package vignette with new paragraph on importing spreadsheet data, a new section "Paid-Incurred Chain Model" and an added example for a full claims development picture in the "One Year Claims Development Result" section, see also [1] .

Binary versions of the package will appear on the various CRAN mirrors over the next couple of days. Alternatively you can install ChainLadder directly from GitHub using the following R commands:

install.packages(c(“systemfit”, “actuar", "statmod", "tweedie", "devtools"))
library(devtools)
install_github("mages/ChainLadder")
library(ChainLadder)

Completely new to ChainLadder? Start with the package vignette.

References

[1] Claims run-off uncertainty: the full picture. (with M. Merz) SSRN Manuscript, ID 2524352, 2014.

Adding mathematical notations to R plots

I have to admit that I find the plotmath expressions in R a little fiddly to annotate plots with mathematical notation.

Apparently I am not the only one, but Stefano Meschiari did actually something about it. A few days ago his package latex2exp appeared on CRAN.

The package provides the wonderful function latex2exp that translates LaTeX code into plotmath expressions. Brillant! All I have to remember is to escape the "\" character, that is write "\\" instead of "\".

Below is the first example from the plotmath help file and again using latex2exp. I think this is much easier to read and write.



You find more information about latex2exp on Stefano's web site and his GitHub repository.

Session Info

R version 3.2.1 (2015-06-18)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.4 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base     

other attached packages:
[1] latex2exp_0.3.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] magrittr_1.5 tools_3.2.1 Rcpp_0.11.6 stringi_0.5-5 stringr_1.0.0