At the last Cologne R user meeting Holger Zien gave a great introduction to dynamic linear models (dlm). One special case of a dlm is the Kalman filter, which I will discuss in this post in more detail. I kind of used it earlier when I measured the temperature in ... [Read more...]

Last week's Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended so far, and it was a remarkable event - I believe not a single line of R code was shown. Still, it was an R user group meeting with two excellent talks, and you will understand shortly why not ... [Read more...]

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 December 2014.We have an exciting agenda with two talks on Julia and Dynamic Linear Models:Introduction to Julia for R Users Hans Werner BorchersJulia is a high-performance dynamic programming language for scientific computing, with a syntax that is ... [Read more...]

It is getting colder in London, yet it is still quite mild considering that it is late November. Well, indoors it still feels like 20°C (68°F) to me, but I have been told last week that I should switch on the heating. Luckily I found an old thermometer to check. ... [Read more...]

Taking the first step is often the hardest: getting data from Excel into R. Suppose you would like to use the ChainLadder package to forecast future claims payments for a run-off triangle that you have stored in Excel. How do you get the triangle into R and execute a reserving ... [Read more...]

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The forthcoming R Journal has an interesting article about phaseR: An R Package for Phase Plane Analysis of Autonomous ODE Systems by Michael J. Grayling. The package has some nice functions to analysis one and two dimensional dynamical systems. As an example I use here the FitzHugh-Nagumo system introduced earlier:... [Read more...]

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Deploying applications via Docker container is the current talk of town. I have heard about Docker and played around with it a little, but when Dirk Eddelbuettel posted his R and Docker talk last Friday I got really excited and had to have a go myself.... [Read more...]

One of my take aways from last week's EARL conference was that R is more and more growing out of its academic roots into the enterprise. And with that come some challenges, e.g. how do I ensure consistent and systematic access to a set of R packages in an ... [Read more...]

Last Friday we had guests from Belgium and the Netherlands joining us in Cologne. Maarten-Jan Kallen from BeDataDriven came from The Hague to introduce us to Renjin, and the guys from DataCamp in Leuven, namely Jonathan, Martijn and Dieter, gave an overview of their new online interactive training platform.RenjinMaarten-Jan ... [Read more...]

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 September 2014.We have a great agenda with international speakers: Maarten-Jan Kallen: Introduction to Renjin, the R interpreter for the JVM Jonathan Cornelissen, Martijn Theuwissen: DataCamp - An online interactive learning platform for R The event will be followed ... [Read more...]

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How did I miss the GrapheR package? The author, Maxime Hervé, published an article about the package [1] in the same issue of the R Journal as we did on googleVis. Yet, it took me a package update notification on CRANbeeries to look into GrapheR in more detail - 3 years later! ... [Read more...]

In many cases Word is still the preferred file format for collaboration in the office. Yet, it is often a challenge to work with it, not so much because of the software, but how it is used and abused. Thanks to Markdown it is no longer painful to inclu... [Read more...]

At the R in Insurance conference Arthur Charpentier gave a great keynote talk on Bayesian modelling in R. Bayes' theorem on conditional probabilities is strikingly simple, yet incredibly thought provoking. Here is an example from Daniel Kahneman to test your intuition. But first I have to start with Bayes' theorem.... [Read more...]

The 2nd R in Insurance conference took place last Monday, 14 July, at Cass Business School London. This one-day conference focused once more on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R. Topics covered included reserving, pricing, loss... [Read more...]