mages' blog

The 4th R in Insurance conference took place at Cass Business School London on 11 July 2016. This one-day conference focused once more on the wide range of applications of R in insurance, actuarial science and beyond. The conference programme covered topics including reserving, pricing, loss modelling, the use of R in a production environment and much more.

The audience of the conference included both practitioners (c.80%) and academics (c.20%) who are active or interested in the applications of R in Insurance. It was a truly international event with speakers and delegates from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The coffee breaks and conference dinner offered great networking opportunities.

Mario Wüthrich, ETH Zürich

In the first plenary session Mario Wüthrich (RiskLab ETH Zurich) spoke about the (new) challenges in actuarial science. While fundamentals of analysing data have not changed over the years, the data and technology available has, and with that new challenges emerged. Yet, as Mario pointed out, insurance is still often concerned with analysing 'little' data, as losses occur rarely. Furthermore, the bigger data sets, often generated by sensors, require careful calibration, monitoring and cleansing. Those new challenges provide opportunities for new research (if data is being made available) and the industry. The R community can provide links between the two. Mario would like to see more and better documentation of R packages, more insurance examples and better handling of big data.

Thereafter, the programme consisted of a combination of contributed presentations and lightning talks, as well as a panel discussion on how analytics is transforming the insurance business. Adrian Cuc (Verisk), Simon Brickman (Beazley), Roland Schmid (Mirai Solutions) and Markus Gesmann (Vario Partners) discussed the efforts made in bridging between data vendors, consultants and insurers, as well as the challenges of developing collaborative business models that respond to market needs.

Dan Murphy, Trinostics

In the closing plenary, Dan Murphy (Trinostics, San Francisco) gave an insight into his experience as an actuary on how to provide persuasive advice for senior management. He uses the three-C's: context, confidence and clarity. Context is about articulating the problem in a language senior management can understand it. Why does the management need to worry about the problem? If you have a solution, then you have to deliver it with conviction, because, most importantly is has to be actionable. Clarity, of your actionable insight, ensures that those actions can be delegated to the relevant team/employee by the management without you in the room.

The slides of the conference are available on request.

Scientific committee and sponsors

The members of the scientific committee were: Katrien Antonio (KU Leuven, UvA), Christophe Dutang (Université du Maine), Markus Gesmann (Vario Partners), Giorgio Spedicato (UnipolSai ) and Andreas Tsanakas (Cass Business School).

Finally, we are grateful to our sponsors Verisk, Mirai Solutions, Applied AI, RStudio, CYBAEA and Oasis, without whom the event wouldn't be possible.

R in Insurance 2017

We are delighted to announce next year’s event already. The conference will travel across the Channel to ENSAE, Paris, 8 June 2017. Further details will be published on www.rininsurance.com.

Hurry! The early bird registration offer for the 4th R in Insurance conference, 11 July 2016, at Cass Business School closes 30 May.

This one-day conference will focus once more on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca for statistical computation. Topics covered include reserving, pricing, loss modelling, the use of R in a production environment, and more.

We have a fantastic programme with international speakers and conference dinner at Ironmongers Hall. Keynotes will be given by Mario Wüthrich and Dan Murphy.

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Verisk, Mirai Solutions, Applied AI, Studio, CYBAEA and Oasis, without whom the event wouldn't be possible.

We are delighted to announce that the programme for the 4th R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School in London, 11 July 2016, have been finalised.

Register by the end of May to get the early bird booking fee.

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Verisk, Mirai Solutions, Applied AI, Studio, CYBAEA and Oasis, without whom the event wouldn't be possible.

Last Friday the 2nd Bayesian Mixer Meetup (@BayesianMixer) took place at Cass Business School, thanks to Pietro Millossovich and Andreas Tsanakas, who helped to organise the event.

Bayesian Mixer at Cass

First up was Davide De March talking about the challenges in biochemistry experimentation, which are often characterised by complex and emerging relations among components.

The very little prior knowledge about complex molecules bindings left a fertile field for a probabilistic graphical model. In particular, Bayesian networks can help the investigator in the definition of a conditional dependence/independence structure where a joint multivariate probability distribution is determined. Hence, the use of Bayesian network can lead to a more efficient way of designing experiments.

Davide De March: Bayesian Networks to design optimal experiments

The second act of the night was Mick Cooney, presenting ideas of using growth curves to estimate the ultimate amounts paid in insurance by some cohort of policies.

The talk showed a model for these curves, discussed the implementation in Stan and how posterior predictive checks can be used to assess the output of the model.

Mick Cooney: Bayesian Modelling for Loss Curves in Insurance

Thanks again to everyone who helped to make the event a success, particularly our speakers and Jon Sedar of Applied AI.

We are planning to run another event in mid-June. Please get in touch via our Meetup site with ideas and talk proposals.

Hurry! The abstract submission deadline for the 4th R in Insurance conference in London, 11 July 2016 is approaching soon.

You have until the 28th of March to submit a one-page abstract for consideration. Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. Please email your abstract of no more than 300 words (in text or pdf format) to rinsuranceconference@gmail.com.

Invited talks will be given by:

• Mario V. Wüthrich, RiskLab, Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich.
• Dan Murphy, President, Trinostics LLC.

Details about the registration and abstract submission are given on the dedicated R in Insurance page at Cass Business School, London.

Attendance of the whole conference is the equivalent of 6.5 hours of CPD for members of the Actuarial Profession.

For more information about the past events visit www.rininsurance.com.

Sponsors

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Verisk/ISO, Mirai Solutions, RStudio, Applied AI, CYBAEA, and OASIS Loss Modelling Framework.

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

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 for statistical computation.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

Invited talks will be given by:

• Mario V. Wüthrich, RiskLab, Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich.
• Dan Murphy, President, Trinostics LLC.

Details about the registration and abstract submission are given on the dedicated R in Insurance page at Cass Business School, London.

The submission deadline for abstracts is 28 March 2016. Please email your abstract of no more than 300 words to: rinsuranceconference@gmail.com.

Attendance of the whole conference is the equivalent of 6.5 hours of CPD for members of the Actuarial Profession.

For more information about the past events visit www.rininsurance.com.

Sponsors

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Verisk/ISO, Mirai Solutions, RStudio, Applied AI, and CYBAEA.

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Following the successful 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam this year, we will return to London next year. We will be back at Cass Business School, 11 July 2016.

The event will focus again on the use of R in insurance, bringing together experts from industry and academia with a diverse background of disciplines, such as actuarial science, catastrophe modelling, finance, statistics and computer science.

We are delighted to announce or keynote speakers already: Dan Murphy and Mario V. Wüthrich.

More details about the event will be published in due course here. For now, save the date in your diary.

PS: The picture above is a cluster analysis of the Lloyd's building in R.

The registration for the second conference on R in Insurance on Monday 14 July 2014 at Cass Business School in London has opened.

This one-day conference will focus again on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca for statistical computation. Topics covered may include actuarial statistics, capital modelling, pricing, reserving, reinsurance and extreme events, portfolio allocation, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, econometrics and more. All topics will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for insurance risk management, analysis and modelling.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

Invited talks will be given by:

• Arthur Charpentier, Département de mathématiques Université du Québec à Montréal
• Montserrat Guillen, Dept. Econometrics University of Barcelona together with Leo Guelman, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC Insurance division)

Attendance of the whole conference is the equivalent of 6.5 hours of CPD for members of the Actuarial Profession.

We invite you to submit a one-page abstract for consideration. Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. The submission deadline for abstracts is 28 March 2014.

Details about the registration and abstract submission are given on the dedicated R in Insurance page at Cass Business School.

Sponsors

The organisers, Andreas Tsanakas and Markus Gesmann, gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Mango Solutions, Cybaea, PwC and RStudio.



Last year's programme, abstracts and talks are available online.

Following the very positive feedback that Andreas and I have received from delegates of the first R in Insurance conference in July of this year, we are planning to repeat the event next year. We have already reserved a bigger auditorium.

The second conference on R in Insurance will be held on Monday 14 July 2014 at Cass Business School in London, UK.

This one-day conference will focus again on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca for statistical computation. Topics covered may include actuarial statistics, capital modelling, pricing, reserving, reinsurance and extreme events, portfolio allocation, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, econometrics and more. All topics will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for insurance risk management, analysis and modelling.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

Invited talks will be given by:

• Arthur Charpentier, Département de mathématiques Université du Québec à Montréal
• Montserrat Guillen, Dept. Econometrics University of Barcelona together with Leo Guelman, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC Insurance division)

The members of the scientific committee are: Katrien Antonio (University of Amsterdam and KU Leuven), Christophe Dutang (Université du Maine, France), Jens Nielsen (Cass), Andreas Tsanakas (Cass) and Markus Gesmann (ChainLadder project).

Details about the registration and abstract submission process will be published soon on www.RinInsurance.com.

You can contact us via rinsuranceconference at gmail dot com.

The organisers, Andreas Tsanakas and Markus Gesmann, gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Mango Solutions, RStudio, Cybaea and PwC.

The programme and the presentation files of the first R in Insurance conference have been published on GitHub.

Front slides of the conference presentations

Additionally to the slides many presenters have made their R code available as well:

• Alexander McNeil shared the examples of the CreditRisk+ model he presented.
• Lola Miranda made a Windows version of the double chain-ladder package DCL available via the Cass knowledge web site.
• Alessandro Carrato's 1-year re-reserving code is hosted on the ChainLadder project web site.
• Giorgio Spedicato's life contingencies package is on CRAN already.
  
• Simon Brickman and Adam Rich's HTML presentation and underlying R code for Automated Reporting is included in the GitHub repository.
  
• Stefan Eppert pointed out that KatRisk published an illustrative catastrophe model in R.
• Hugh Shanahan's code to integrate R with Azure for high-throughput analysis is on GitHub.

Thanks again to all the presenters who have helped to make the event a success.

Hopefully, we see you again next year!

Yesterday the first R in Insurance conference took place at Cass Business School in London.

I think the event went really well, but as a member of the organising committee my view is probably skewed. Still, we had a variety of talks, a full house, a great conference dinner and to top it all, the Tower Bridge opened while we had our drinks at the end of the evening.

I will post a more complete review in the future with links to the files of the presentations and R code, once we had a chance to collate all the information.

Many thanks again to all who helped to make this event a success, particularly Andreas Tsanakas at Cass and to our sponsors Mango Solutions and CYBAEA.

The registration for the first conference on R in Insurance on Monday 15 July 2013 at Cass Business School in London has opened.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

The 2013 R in Insurance conference builds upon the success of the R in Finance and R/Rmetrics events. We expect invited keynote lectures by:

• Professor Alexander McNeil, Department of Actuarial Science & Statistics
  Heriot-Watt University: Implementing CreditRisk+ in R with the Faster Fourier Transform
• Trevor Maynard, Head of Exposure Management and Reinsurance, Lloyd's: There is an R in Lloyd's

We invite you to submit a one-page abstract for consideration. Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged.

The submission deadline for abstracts is 28 March 2013. Please email your abstract (in txt or pdf format) to rinsuranceconference at gmail dot com.

The conference committee consists of:

• Jens Perch Nielsen
• Andreas Tsanakas
• Christophe Dutang
• Markus Gesmann

Details about the registration and abstract submission are given on the new dedicated R in Insurance page at Cass Business School.

The organisers, Andreas Tsanakas and Markus Gesmann, gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Mango Solutions.

The first conference on R in Insurance will be held on Monday 15 July 2013 at Cass Business School in London, UK.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

This one-day conference will focus on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca for statistical computation. Topics covered may include actuarial statistics, capital modelling, pricing, reserving, reinsurance and extreme events, portfolio allocation, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, econometrics and more. All topics will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for insurance risk management, analysis and modelling.

The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in insurance.

The 2013 R in Insurance conference builds upon the success of the R in Finance and R/Rmetrics events. We expect invited keynote lectures by:

• Professor Alexander McNeil, Department of Actuarial Science & Statistics
  Heriot-Watt University
• Trevor Maynard, Head of Exposure Management and Reinsurance, Lloyd's

We invite you to submit a one-page abstract for consideration. Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged.

Details about the registration and abstract submission are given on the R in Insurance event web site of Cass Business School.

You can contact us via rinsuranceconference at gmail dot com.

The organisers, Andreas Tsanakas and Markus Gesmann, gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Mango Solutions.