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The 19th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 14 October 2016. We have three talks, followed by networking drinks. Introduction to the tidyverse tools - Jiddu Alexander Performance profiling and improvement in R - Nils Glück Batch processing of R-Scripts with Excel - Klaus Jacobi Venue: Eyeo GmbH, Lichtstraße 25, 50825 Köln For further details visit our KölnRUG Meetup site.

We released googleVis version 0.6.1 on CRAN last week. The update fixes issues with setting certain options, following the switch from RJSONIO to jsonlite. Screen shot of some of the Google Charts New to googleVis? The package provides an interface between R and the Google Charts Tools, allowing you to create interactive web charts from R without uploading your data to Google.

Last Thursday the Cologne R user group came together again. This time, our two speakers arrived from Bavaria, to talk about Spark and R Server. Introduction to Apache Spark Download slides Dubravko Dulic gave an introduction to Apache Spark and why Spark might be of interest to data scientists using R. Spark is designed for cluster computing, i.

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.

The 17th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 26 February 2016. We have two talks, followed by networking drinks. Introduction to Bayesian Regression Models using Stan with the brms package - Paul-Christian Bürkner (Uni Münster) RKWard: A Graphical User Interface and Integrated Development Environment for Statistical Analysis with R - Meik Michalke (Uni Düsseldorf) Venue: Microsoft Deutschland, Holzmarkt 2a Cologne 50676 DE, Köln

We had our first successful Bayesian Mixer Meetup last Friday night at the Artillery Arms! We expected about 15 - 20 people to turn up, when we booked the function room overlooking Bunhill Cemetery and Bayes’ grave. Now, looking at the photos taken during the evening, it seems that our prior believe was pretty good. The event started with a talk from my side about some very basic Bayesian models, which I used a while back to get my head around the concepts in an insurance context.

The 16th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 4 December 2015 and we have great line up with three talks followed by networking drinks. Monitoring process change using Bayesian methods (Mick Cooney) A common business problem is to evaluate the effect of a change of process, and this talk will discuss a straightforward approach to this using conjugate priors. Editing R files with DataJoy (Dietmar Janetzko) Brief introduction to the online collaborative data analysis platform DataJoy.

The 15th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 18 September 2015 and we have a full agenda with three talks followed by networking drinks. R in big data pipeline with luigi (Yuki Katoh) R in big data pipeline: Put your awesome R codes into production. Learn how to build solid big data pipeline around it. shinyjs (Paul Viefers) Using JavaScript in shiny, without knowing JavaScript Experience vs Data (Markus Gesmann) How to asses risks with small data sets.

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 6 June 2015 and we have an exciting agenda with two talks followed by networking drinks. Data Science at the Commandline (Kirill Pomogajko) An Introduction to RStan and the Stan Modelling Language (Paul Viefers) Please note: Our venue changed! We have outgrown the seminar room at the Institute of Sociology and move to Startplatz, a start-up incubator venue: Im Mediapark, 550670 Köln Drinks and Networking The event will be followed by drinks (Kölsch!

I love interactive pivot tables. That is the number one reason why I keep using spreadsheet software. The ability to look at data quickly in lots of different ways, without a single line of code helps me to get an understanding of the data really fast. Perhaps I can do the same now in R as well. At yesterday’s LondonR meeting Enzo Martoglio presented briefly his rpivotTable package. Enzo builds on Nicolas Kruchten’s PivotTable.

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 6 March 2015 and we have an exciting agenda with two talks, followed by networking drinks: Using R in Excel via R.NET Günter Faes and Matthias Spix MS Office and Excel are the ‘de-facto’ standards in many industries. Using R with Excel offers an opportunity to combine the statistical power of R with a familiar user interface.

The registration for the third conference on R in Insurance on Monday 29 June 2015 at the University of Amsterdam 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.

We released googleVis version 0.5.8 on CRAN last week. The update is a maintenance release for the forthcoming release of R 3.2.0. Screen shot of some of the Google Charts New to googleVis? The package provides an interface between R and the Google Charts Tools, allowing you to create interactive web charts from R without uploading your data to Google.

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 Borchers Julia is a high-performance dynamic programming language for scientific computing, with a syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments (Matlab, Python, R, etc.). It provides a sophisticated compiler, high performance with numerical accuracy, and extensive mathematical function libraries.

Version 0.5.6 of googleVis was released on CRAN over the weekend. This version fixes a bug in gvisMotionChart. Its arguments xvar, yvar, sizevar and colorvar were not always picked up correctly. Thanks to Juuso Parkkinen for reporting this issue. Example: Love, or to love A few years ago Martin Hilpert posted an interesting case study for motion charts. Martin is a linguist and he researched how the usage of words in American English changed over time, e.

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 by drinks and schnitzel at the Lux. For further details visit our KölnRUG Meetup site.

Over the weekend we released version 0.1.8 of the ChainLadder package for claims reserving on CRAN. What is claims reserving? The insurance industry, unlike other industries, does not sell products as such but promises. An insurance policy is a promise by the insurer to the policyholder to pay for future claims for an upfront received premium. As a result insurers don’t know the upfront cost for their service, but rely on historical data analysis and judgement to predict a sustainable price for their offering.

Earlier this week we released googleVis 0.5.5 on CRAN. The package provides an interface between R and Google Charts, allowing you to create interactive web charts from R. This is mainly a maintenance release, updating documentation and minor issues. Screen shot of some of the Google Charts New to googleVis? Review the examples of all googleVis charts on CRAN.

Recently we released googleVis 0.5.3 on CRAN. The package provides an interface between R and Google Charts, allowing you to create interactive web charts from R. Screen shot of some of the Google Charts Although this is mainly a maintenance release, I’d like to point out two changes: Default chart width is set to ‘automatic’ instead of 500 pixels.

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 23 May 2014. To celebrate our 10th meeting we welcome: Andrie de Vries (Revolution Analytics and Co-author of R for Dummies): Taking R to the Enterprise Markus Gesmann: googleVis overview and recent developments Followed by drinks and schnitzel at the Lux. Further details available on our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along.

GoogleVis 0.5.1 was released on CRAN yesterday. New Features New functions gvisSankey, gvisAnnotationChart, gvisHistogram, gvisCalendar and gvisTimeline to support the new Google charts of the same names (without ‘gvis’). New demo Trendlines showing how trend-lines can be added to Scatter-, Bar-, Column-, and Line Charts. New demo Roles showing how different column roles can be used in core charts to highlight data.

After nearly 4 years of developing googleVis on Google Code with SVN we decided to move to GitHub. The main reason was that Google stopped the facility of hosting pre-CRAN builds of the package for user testing. The devtools package on the other hand makes it really easy to install packages from source hosted on GitHub. Additionally, we hope that GitHub will make collaboration with others more effective. Thus, bookmark http://github.

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, 26 February 2014. We are delighted to welcome: Diego de Castillo: R and databases Kim Kuen Tang: Hands on using R and kdb+ together Frank Celler: ArangoDB (Lightning Talk) Further details and the agenda are available on our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along.

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.

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 13 December 2013. We are delighted to welcome: Matt Dowle and Arun Srinivasan: Introduction to data.table Thomas Rahlf: Book presentation - Datendesign mit R Further details and the agenda are available on our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from past meetings are available here.

In my previous post, I presented a preview version of googleVis that provided an integration with RStudio’s Viewer pane (introduced with version 0.98.441). Over 80% in my little survey favoured the new default output mechanism of googleVis within RStudio. Hence, I uploaded googleVis 0.4.7 on CRAN over the weekend. However, there were also some thoughtful comments, which suggested that the RStudio Viewer pane is not always the best option. Indeed, Flash charts and gvisMerge output will still be displayed in your default browser, but also if you work on larger charts and with smaller screen, then the browser might still be the better option compared to the Viewer pane - of course you can launch the browser from the Viewer pane as well.

The preview version 0.98.441 of RStudio introduced a new viewer pane to render local web content and with that it allows me to display googleVis charts within RStudio rather than in a separate browser window. I think this is a rather nice feature and hence I have updated the plot method in googleVis to use the RStudio viewer pane as the default output. If you use another editor, or if the plot is using one of the Flash based charts, then the browser is still the default display.

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 18 October 2013. We will discuss and hear about the apply family of functions and the XLConnect package. Further details and the agenda are available on our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from past meetings are available here. Thanks to Revolution Analytics, who sponsors the Cologne R user group as part of their vector programme.

Over the weekend googleVis 0.4.4 found its way to CRAN. The function gvisTable gained a new argument formats that allow users to define the formats numbers displayed in tables. Thanks to J. Buros, who contributed the code. Example Loading Session Info R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16) Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit) 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 [7] base other attached packages: [1] googleVis_0.

Version 0.1.6 of the ChainLadder package has been released and is already available from CRAN. The new version adds the function CLFMdelta. CLFMdelta finds consistent weighting parameters delta for a vector of selected age-to-age chain-ladder factors for a given run-off triangle. The added functionality was implemented by Dan Murphy, who is the co-author of the paper A Family of Chain-Ladder Factor Models for Selected Link Ratios by Bardis, Majidi, Murphy.

The useR!2013 conference in Albacete, Spain, will commence next Wednesday, 10 July, and on the day before Diego and I will give a googleVis tutorial. The following Monday, 15 July, the first R in Insurance event will take place at Cass Business School and I am absolutely delighted with the programme and the fact that we are sold out. On Tuesday, 16 July, the LondonR user group meets in the City, awaiting presentations by Andrie de Vries (Revolution Analytics), Rich Pugh (Mango Solutions) and Hadley Wickham (RStudio).

The Google Charts Tools provide two kinds of heat map charts for geographical data, the Flash based Geomap and the HTML5/SVG based Geochart. I prefer the Geochart as it doesn’t require Flash, but so far there have been two shortcomings with it: I couldn’t add additional tooltip information and the default Mercator projection shows Greenland the size of Africa. Both of those issues seemed to have been resolved by Google.

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 April 2013. We will discuss cluster analysis and shiny. Further details and the agenda are available on our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from the last Cologne R user group meeting are available here. Thanks also to Revolution Analytics, who sponsors the Cologne R user group as part of their vector programme.

Last week we released version 0.1.5-6 of the ChainLadder package on CRAN. The ChainLadder package provides statistical models, which are typically used for the estimation of outstanding claims reserves in general insurance. The package vignette gives an overview of the package functionality. Output of plot(MackChainLadder(GenIns)) Since the last CRAN release Dan Murphy added new features to the MackChainLadder function and we fixed a bug in BootChainLadder.

The new version of googleVis 0.4.2 is now available via CRAN. Many thanks to all who provided feedback on version 0.4.0 and particularly to Sebastian Campbell, John Maindonald and Aonan Zhang. As usual, if you find any issues or bugs, please send us an email or add a line to our online issues log. With version 0.4.0 we introduced support for googleVis on shiny. See my previous post for more details and examples.

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.

Lloyd’s of London is looking for a Data Scientist as part of the Analysis team. See Lloyd’s career web site for more details.

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, 6 February 2013. All details and the agenda are available on the KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from the last Cologne R user group meeting are available here. Thanks also to Revolution Analytics, who are sponsoring the Cologne R user group as part of their vector programme.

Last week we released version 0.1.5-4 of the ChainLadder package on CRAN. The R package provides methods which are typically used in insurance claims reserving. If you are new to R or insurance check out my recent talk on Using R in Insurance. The chain-ladder method which is a popular method in the insurance industry to forecast future claims payments gave the package its name. However, the ChainLadder package has many other reserving methods and models implemented as well, such as the bootstrap model demonstrated below.

I am very grateful to all who provided feedback over the last two weeks and tested the previous versions 0.3.1 and 0.3.2, which were not released on CRAN. So, what changed since version 0.3.2? Not much, but plot.gvis didn’t open a browser window when options(gvis.plot.tag) were not set to NULL, but the user explicitly called plot.gvis with tag NULL. Thanks to Sebastian Kranz for reporting this bug. Additionally the vignette has been updated and includes an extended section on knitr.

After last week’s kerfuffle I hope the roll out of googleVis version 0.3.2 will be smooth. To test the water I release this version into the wild here and if it doesn’t get shot down in the next days, then I shall try to upload it to CRAN. I am mindful of the CRAN policy, so please get in touch or add comments below if you find any show stoppers.

Version 0.3.0 of the googleVis package for R has been released on CRAN on 20 October 2012. With this version we have been able to speed up the code considerably. The transformation of R data frames into JSON works significantly faster. The execution of the gvisMotionChart function in the World Bank demo is over 35 times faster. Thanks to ideas by Wei Luo and in particular to Sebastian Kranz for providing the code.

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for 5 October 2012. All details and the agenda are available on the KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from the last Cologne R user group meeting are available here. Thanks also to Revolution Analytics, who are sponsoring the Cologne R user group as part of their vector programme. View Larger Map

The next version of the googleVis package has been released on the project site and CRAN. This version provides updates to the package vignette and a new example for the gvisMerge function. The new sections of the vignette have been featured on this blog in more detail earlier: Using googleVis with knitr (Link to post) Using Rook with googleVis (Link to post) Using Reduce with gvisMerge to display several charts on a page (Link to post) Additionally two little bugs were fixed: Data frames with one row only were not displayed in a chart.

This post is a quick reminder that the next Cologne R user group meeting is only one week away. We will meet on 6 July 2012. The meeting will kick off at 18:00 with three short talks at the Institute of Sociology and will continue, even more informal, from 20:00 in a pub (LUX) nearby. All details are available on the KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along.

A new version of googleVis has been released on CRAN and the project site. Version 0.2.16 adds the functionality to plot quarterly and monthly data as a motion chart. To illustrate the new feature I looked for a quarterly data set and stumbled across the quarterly UK house price data published by Nationwide, a building society. The data is available in a spread sheet format and presents the average house prices and indexed to 100 in Q1 1993 by region in the UK from Q4 1973 to Q1 2012.

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for 6 July 2012. All details are available on the new KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along, and notice that there is also pub poll for the after “work” drinks. Notes from the first Cologne R user group meeting are available here. View Larger Map

Am 30. März 2012 möchte ich gerne das erste Kölner R Benutzer Treffen organisieren. Ich habe an den Treffen in London in den vergangen Jahren teilgenommen und hoffe auch in Köln Gleichgesinnte zu finden, die sich gerne bei einem Kölsch über R and das Leben unterhalten würden. I would like to organise the first R user group meeting in Cologne, Germany, on 30 March 2012. In the past few years I have participated at the London R user groups and I hope to find also like-minded people in Cologne, who would like to catch up over a Kölsch on R and life in general.

David Chan from City University is organising an interdisciplinary symposium on tackling the ‘Big Data’ challenge on 1 March 2012. It is an open seminar trying to bring together academics and practitioners from across industry to tackle the challenges posed by “big data” - the growing amount of information that needs to be stored, searched, analysed and visualised in the digital age. The event will take place in the Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB.