Articles by PirateGrunt

More fun with data frames

June 12, 2013 | PirateGrunt

Data frames are such a straightforward and essential element of R that it’s easy to lose sight of some of their peculiarities. Last week, I developed some code which would tear apart some data frames and create new ones based on columns specified by the user. This would allow ... [Read more...]

Computed columns for dataframes

May 8, 2013 | PirateGrunt

Everyone loves to aggregate data. Everyone loves to create new columns based on other columns. Everyone hates to do the same thing twice. In my continuing work on multilevel view of loss reserving, I reached a point where I realized that I needed a robust mechanism to aggregate computed columns. ... [Read more...]

Callback functions for GUI widgets

March 18, 2013 | PirateGrunt

Of all the things I dislike about R, one of the biggest is the fact that you can declare a function within the list of arguments to another function. I’ve gotten over it for very minor operations needed by things like lapply, but it can drive me bonkers elsewhere. ... [Read more...]

Clustering Loss Development Factors

February 15, 2013 | PirateGrunt

  Anytime I get a new hammer, I waste no time in trying to find something to bash with it. Prior to last year, I wouldn’t have known what a cluster was, other than the first half of a slang term used to describe a poor decision-making process. Now I’... [Read more...]

Object Orientation in R – Notes from a novice

January 25, 2013 | PirateGrunt

Having posted some code to Git a few days ago and having been wholly dissatisfied with it, I began to do what I often do with code I don’t like. I started re-writing it bigger and weirder and more philosophically pure. Part of this search for Platonic code lead ... [Read more...]

Loss reserving has a new, silly name

January 18, 2013 | PirateGrunt

I started using Git some time ago, but mostly for local work files. Today, I finally sync’ed up a repository for loss reserving analysis. It may be found here: https://github.com/PirateGrunt/MRMR MRMR stands for Multivariate Regression Model for Reserves. When pronounced “Mister Mister” it also sounds ... [Read more...]

You can’t spell loss reserving without R

January 2, 2013 | PirateGrunt

Last year, I spent a morning trying to return to first principles when modeling loss reserves. (Brief aside to non-actuaries: a loss reserve is the financial provision set aside to pay for claims which have either not yet settled, or have not yet been reported. If that doesn’t sound ... [Read more...]

NFL Code on Github

January 2, 2013 | PirateGrunt

I’ve made some revisions and simplifications to the code to compile NFL data. It’s now all out on Github for anyone to play with in advance of the Superbowl. In the meantime, here’s a lovely picture comparing every team’s offense- as measured by total offensive yards- ... [Read more...]

Nested loops with mapply

December 31, 2012 | PirateGrunt

So as I sink deeper into the second level of R enlightenment, one thing troubled me. “lapply” is fine for looping over a single vector of elements, but it doesn’t do a nested loop structure. These tend to be pretty ubiquitous for me. I’m forever doing the same ... [Read more...]

Querying, parsimony and golden hammers

December 20, 2012 | PirateGrunt

I love it when things are easy. I love it so much that I’ll spend a great deal of time and effort to keep things simple. At the same time, though, I think there’s some value in expending effort in pursuit of something. If you want to understand ... [Read more...]

Turnovers are poison

December 20, 2012 | PirateGrunt

This is probably a slightly useless post, but a bit of fun all the same. If nothing else, it allows me to take a stab at learning a bit more about logistic regression. I’m still trying to unravel the mystery of why the Bears lost to the Vikings two ... [Read more...]

Testing Assumption Testing

December 13, 2012 | PirateGrunt

I’ve been doing a lot of linear modeling this year. That’s not much different than any ordinary year, but now I’m doing it in R. I had spent a bit of time in recent years trying to look at loss reserving as a multivariate regression. Excel is ... [Read more...]

NFL Prediction – Algorithm 1

December 5, 2012 | PirateGrunt

So I tidied the code up a bit from last time; no more for loop. Actually, I tidied it up a lot. My goal had been to arrange the data in such a way that I could get a simple moving average of the score difference for each team. That ... [Read more...]

Pro Football Data

December 1, 2012 | PirateGrunt

I’ve made the acquaintance of a group of data analysts here in the triangle and have agreed to arrange an outing to the Durham Bulls minor league baseball team. Because it’s for stat nerds and because I was curious, I went looking for some baseball data to analyze. ... [Read more...]
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