Today, I'm going to finally dip my toe in the water of something I've wanted to do for a long time. I'd wanted to do this with Michael Caine film appearances- and I may yet- but tonight, it'll be a bit simpler. I'm going to draw a network graph, showing ... [Read more...]

I don't know how often Michael Caine appeared in a Shakespearean work, but I'm sure that he has and I'm sure that he was excellent. A bit pressed for time today, so just a simple word cloud featuring the full text of King Lear. I found the text at a ... [Read more...]

How often is someone nominated for an academy award? Who has been nominated most often? Is there a difference between leading and supporting roles? Important questions. To answer them, I'm making use of a list of academy award nominees and winners. I've obtained the data from aggdata.com which has ... [Read more...]

This will be the third time I've tried to write this post. I had started out presuming that I would uncover something fascinating about applying Bayesian inference to a low-frequency claims generation process. That isn't at all what I got and I ought to have known better when I started. ... [Read more...]

I saved the data from the last post which shows the percentage of Republican voters in each county. In addition to that column, I also have figures from the 2010 census. This will show things like age, ethnicity, urbanization and home ownership. Those census figures show actual population counts, so they'll ... [Read more...]

Carrying on from the last post, I'm going to take a closer look at election results for the 2012 US presidential election in North Carolina. This state's 15 electoral votes went to the Republican, Mitt Romney. On the US electoral college map, that means the state shows up as red. As I ... [Read more...]

I've finally had some success at munging some HTML. For quite some time, I've wanted to render a county level choropleth for US presidential election results. The numbers are all there on Politico.com, but attempts to use readHTMLTable never returned the full set of data. It still doesn't, but ... [Read more...]

Some time back, I started a project on GitHub wherein I would explore the efficacy of financial literacy efforts in the area where I live. This is done with the support of a local non-profit organization. As a first step, I tried to draw a picture of the area at ... [Read more...]

So my first attempt to sort out the career of Michael Caine via parsing of HTML data was a wash. I'm going to try this again, using Wikipedia. They've got a nice, easy list of his films in an HTML table. Reading an HTML table into R is incredibly easy. ... [Read more...]

This is the post where we begin to talk about Michael Caine. There's no strong reason for this. It's not as though I have a great fascination with him. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a fine actor. Michael Caine happened to cross my mind a couple weeks ago ... [Read more...]

Need a Hanukkah or Christmas gift for an R analyst? You could do loads worse than Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R by Bivand, Pebesma and Gomez-Rubio. I don't have my copy yet- I'm still working through all of the other books I've bought this year- but I'll likely pick ... [Read more...]

Last year, the good people at is.R() spent December publishing an R advent calendar. This meant that for 24 days, every day, there was an interesting post featuring analysis and some excellent visualizations in R. I think it's an interesting (if very challenging) exercise and I'm going to try to ... [Read more...]

In a recent post, I discussed the occurrence of hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin. The data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a member of the US federal government. The data spans a bit more than 150 years. In that post, I make the observation that the data ... [Read more...]

On vacation with my family this week and that means I have a few minutes now and again to read. One of the books I brought along is Christopher Gandrud’s excellent “Reproducible Research with R and RStudio”. Looking for some data as a test project, I latched onto Hurricane ... [Read more...]

I’m on record as being a big fan of Coursera and have wanted to try and create my own video content ever since I saw theirs. Obviously they’re much better at it than I am, both in terms of production quality and content. Still, there probably isn’t ... [Read more...]

MRMR version 0.1.3 is now available on CRAN. This is (almost) the same version that was discussed at the CLRS two weeks ago. MRMR – Multivariate Regression Models for Reserving- is a tool for non-life actuaries to estimate liability reserves. The emphasis is on exploratory data analysis, visualization and model diagnostics. At ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure to speak about using R for loss reserving at the Casualty Loss Reserving Seminar in Boston. My time was spent talking about MRMR, an R package that I’ve created. Version 0.1.2 is now on CRAN, but as there are a couple of bugs, I’... [Read more...]

Here’s another rabbit hole where I spent a bit of time this evening. I like OOP and I like the way R uses vectors. I’ve created a few classes and had started to code a function which would plot a set of them. It all seemed straightforward until ... [Read more...]

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for ages. My formal training for most things is limited. Like a lot of folks, I’m an autodidact. This is good in that I’m always learning and always studying those things that I enjoy. At the same time, it ... [Read more...]

For some time now, I’ve advocated for the view that non-life loss reserving constitutes a categorized linear regression. I’ll emphasize that the idea of a linear regression isn’t remotely novel. Further, the categorization is the de facto approach. I’m merely recognizing it and suggesting instances where ... [Read more...]