Posts

Introduction It’s been three years since the Casualty Actuarial Society published our research paper on Hierarchical Compartmental …

This post is about the Black-Litterman (BL) model for asset allocation and the basis of my talk at the Dublin Data Science Meet-up. The …

Version 0.7.0 of the googleVis R package has been released, adding a new function for Gantt charts. Gantt charts are helpful to …

It is exactly one year ago that the Casualty Actuarial Society published our research paper on Hierarchical Compartmental Reserving …

On Sunday the Tokyo Olympics men sprint 100m final will take place. Francesc Montané reminded me in his analysis that 9 years ago I …

Finally, the Insurance Data Science conference was back last week. After last year’s cancellation due to Covid-19 over 250 delegates …

Book your ticket by 9 June 2021

This article illustrates how ordinary differential equations and multivariate observations can be modelled and fitted with the brms …

Over the last year I worked with Jake Morris on a research paper for the Casualty Actuarial Society. We are delighted to see it …

The Insurance Data Science conferences casts it shadows for 2020 already. Indeed, you read correctly, we have more than one event this …

The call for abstracts is open for the third Insurance Data Science Conference at Cass Business School, City, University of London, 22 …

The second Insurance Data Science Conference at RiskLab (ETH Zurich) followed on from its first edition at Cass Business School …

It’s been while since the last update on googleVis. Well, the Google Chart Tools are fairly settled now, but some time ago Google added …

The 2nd Insurance Data Science conference will take place at ETH Zurich, 14 June 2019. Following the launch in London at Cass Business …

At the Insurance Data Science conference, both Eric Novik and Paul-Christian Bürkner emphasised in their talks the value of thinking …

The first Insurance Data Science event was held at Cass Business School last week, 16 - 17 July 2018. The conference followed on from …

Ahead of the Stan Workshop on Tuesday, here is another example of using brms (Bürkner (2017)) for claims reserving. This time I will …

How do you build a model from first principles? Here is a step by step guide. Following on from last week’s post on Principled Bayesian …

On Thursday evening Michael Betancourt gave an insightful and thought provoking talk on Principled Bayesian Workflow at the Baysian …

Insurance Data Science The abstract submission deadline for the Insurance Data Science conference at Cass Business School on 16 July …

This is a follow-up post on hierarchical compartmental reserving models using PK/PD models. It will show how differential equations can …

Today, I will sketch out ideas from the Hierarchical Compartmental Models for Loss Reserving paper by Jake Morris, which was published …

Following five R in Insurance conferences, we are organising the first Insurance Data Science conference at Cass Business School …

Last week I wrote about Glenn Meyers’ correlated log-normal chain-ladder model (CCL), which he presented at the 10th Bayesian Mixer …

On 23 November Glenn Meyers gave a fascinating talk about The Bayesian Revolution in Stochastic Loss Reserving at the 10th Bayesian …

After six years on Google’s Blogger platform I migrated my blog to Hugo. Blogger was a great platform to start blogging, it was/ is …

The fifth R in Insurance conference took place at Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique, Paris on 8 June …

The programme for the 2017 R in Insurance conference in Paris has been published. Talks will discuss new ideas and research with the …

The fifth conference on R in Insurance will be held on 8 June 2017 at ENSAE. ENSAE is the Paris Graduate School for Economics, …

Last Friday the Cologne R user group came together for two talks and a quiz at Eye/o, the company behind Adblock Plus, in …

The 19th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 14 October 2016. We have three talks, followed by networking …

Last Tuesday we got together for the 4th Bayesian Mixer Meetup. Product Madness kindly hosted us at their offices in Euston Square. …

Last week the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) organised with the Stan Group a training programme on …

We released googleVis version 0.6.1 on CRAN last week. The update fixes issues with setting certain options, following the switch from …

The 4th R in Insurance conference took place at Cass Business School London on 11 July 2016. This one-day conference focused once more …

Last Thursday the Cologne R user group came together again. This time, our two speakers arrived from Bavaria, to talk about Spark and R …

Two Bayesian Mixer meet-ups in a row. Can it get any better? Our third ‘regular’ meeting took place at Cass Business School on 24 June. …

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

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

Staying on top of new CRAN packages is quite a challenge nowadays. However, thanks to Dirk’s CRANberries service I occasionally spot a …

Last Friday the 2nd Bayesian Mixer Meetup (@BayesianMixer) took place at Cass Business School, thanks to Pietro Millossovich and …

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

Last Friday the Cologne R user group came together for the 17th time. This time, we were in for a special treatment, with two talks by …

The 17th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 26 February 2016. We have two talks, followed by networking drinks. …

We had our first successful Bayesian Mixer Meetup last Friday night at the Artillery Arms! We expected about 15 - 20 people to turn up, …

My traditional work flow for embedding R graphics into a blog post has been via a PNG files that I upload online. However, when I …

There is a nice pub between Bunhill Fields and the Royal Statistical Society in London: The Artillery Arms. Clearly, the perfect place …

I have admired the work of the artist Bridget Riley for a long time. She is now in her eighties, but as it seems still very creative …

Formatting data for output in a table can be a bit of a pain in R. The package formattable by Kun Ren and Kenton Russell provides some …

Following the successful 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam last year, we return to London this year. The registration for the …

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 …

I had the great pleasure time to attend the Warsaw R meetup last Thursday. The organisers Olga Mierzwa and Przemyslaw Biecek had put …

I continue with the growth curve model for loss reserving from last week’s post. Today, following the ideas of James Guszcza [2] I will …

Last week I posted a biological example of fitting a non-linear growth curve with Stan/RStan. Today, I want to apply a similar approach …

I suppose the go to tool for fitting non-linear models in R is nls of the stats package. In this post I will show an alternative …

Following the successful 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam this year, we will return to London next year. We will be back at …

We released version 0.2.2 of ChainLadder a few weeks ago. This version adds back the functionality to estimate the index parameter for …

Last Friday the Cologne R user group came together for the 15th time. Since its inception over three years ago the group evolved from a …

The 15th Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 18 September 2015 and we have a full agenda with three talks …

It seems the summer is coming to end in London, so I shall take a final look at my ice cream data that I have been playing around with …

Last week I presented visualisations of theoretical distributions that predict ice cream sales statistics based on linear and …

Two weeks ago I discussed various linear and generalised linear models in R using ice cream sales statistics. The data showed not …

Linear models are the bread and butter of statistics, but there is a lot more to it than taking a ruler and drawing a line through a …

Photo: Arthur Charpentier The R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam was a sold out success! Congratulations to the organising …

After four years of daily use our MacBook Air informed us that it needed a battery replacement. That’s kind of nice to know, in …

Over the weekend we released version 0.2.1 of the ChainLadder package for claims reserving on CRAN. New Features New function …

I have to admit that I find the plotmath expressions in R a little fiddly to annotate plots with mathematical notation. Apparently I am …

Last Friday the Cologne R user group came together for the 14th time. For the first time we met at Startplatz, a start-up incubator …

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 …

I like the Economist theme in the latticeExtra package. It produces nice looking charts that mimic the design of the weekly newspaper, …

The forthcoming R Journal has an interesting article on the showtext package by Yixuan Qiu. The package allows me to use system and web …

I had a great time at the R/Finance conference in Chicago last Friday/Saturday. Some brief takeaways for me were: From Emanuel Derman’s …

I will be speaking at the Bay Area User Group meeting tonight about Communicating Risk. Anthony Goldbloom from Kaggle and Karim Chine …

I continue my Stan experiments with another insurance example. Here I am particular interested in the posterior predictive distribution …

In my previous post I discussed how Longley-Cook, an actuary at an insurance company in the 1950’s, used Bayesian reasoning to estimate …

Suppose you have to predict the probabilities of events which haven’t happened yet. How do you do this? Here is an example from the …

The programme for the 3rd R in Insurance conference is on-line. The event will take place on 29 June 2015 at the University of …

Last week I mentioned the grid.arrange function of the gridExtra package that allows me to combine graphical grid objects onto one …

Occasionally I’d like to plot a table alongside a chart in R, e.g. to present summary statistics of the graph itself. Thanks to the …

I mused over Test Driven Analysis on this blog before, but it was Richard Pugh’s talk on SAS to R Migration at LondonR last week that …

I love interactive pivot tables. That is the number one reason why I keep using spreadsheet software. The ability to look at data …

ChainLadder is an R package that provides statistical methods and models for claims reserving in general insurance. With version 0.2.0 …

Hurry! The abstract submission deadline for the 3rd R in Insurance conference in Amsterdam, 29 June 2015 is approaching soon. You …

At last Friday’s Cologne R user group meeting we welcomed two Northerners from the left and right (or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) side of the …

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 6 March 2015 and we have an exciting agenda with two talks, …

The other day I got stuck working with a huge data set using data.table in R. It took me a little while to realise that I had to …

I have experimented with reading an Arduino signal into R in the past, using Rserve and Processing. Actually, it is much easier. I can …

They all try to do something new and take the risk to be seen as a fool. Over the last few days I stumbled over three videos by a …

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

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. …

David Spiegelhalter gave a fascinating talk on Communicating Risk and Uncertainty to the Public & Policymakers at the Grantham …

Last week’s post about the Kalman filter focused on the derivation of the algorithm. Today I will continue with the extended Kalman …

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 …

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 …

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 December 2014. We have an exciting agenda with two talks on …

It is really getting colder in London - it is now about 5°C outside. The heating is on and I have got better at measuring the …

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 …

Taking the first step is often the hardest: getting data from Excel into R. Suppose you would like to use the ChainLadder package to …

Have I missed unknown pleasures in Python by focusing on R? A comment on my blog post of last week suggested just that. Reason enough …

The forthcoming R Journal has an interesting article about phaseR: An R Package for Phase Plane Analysis of Autonomous ODE Systems by …

Everyone is talking about Big Data1, but it is the small data that is holding everything together. The small slowly changing reference …

The other day someone mentioned to me a rule of thumb that he was using to estimate the number of years \(n\) it would take for …

Version 0.5.6 of googleVis was released on CRAN over the weekend. This version fixes a bug in gvisMotionChart. Its arguments xvar, …

Last week Arthur Charpentier sketched out a Markov spatial process to generate hurricane trajectories. Here, I would like to take …

Deploying applications via Docker container is the current talk of town. I have heard about Docker and played around with it a little, …

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 …

Last Friday we had guests from Belgium and the Netherlands joining us in Cologne. Maarten-Jan Kallen from BeDataDriven came from The …

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 September 2014. We have a great agenda with international …

The Google Charts API is quite powerful and via googleVis you can access it from R. Here is an example that demonstrates how you can …

Over the weekend we released version 0.1.8 of the ChainLadder package for claims reserving on CRAN. What is claims reserving? The …

Earlier this week we released googleVis 0.5.5 on CRAN. The package provides an interface between R and Google Charts, allowing you to …

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 …

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, …

At the R in Insurance conference Arthur Charpentier gave a great keynote talk on Bayesian modelling in R. Bayes’ theorem on conditional …

The 2nd R in Insurance conference took place last Monday, 14 July, at Cass Business School London. This one-day conference focused once …

Occasionally I have to connect to services from R that ask for login details, such as databases. I don’t like to store my login details …

Recently we released googleVis 0.5.3 on CRAN. The package provides an interface between R and Google Charts, allowing you to create …

The registration for the 2nd R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School London will close this Friday, 4 July. The programme …

This post will present the wonderful pairs.panels function of the psych package [1] that I discovered recently to visualise …

The World Cup has finally kicked off last Thursday and I have seen some fantastic games already. Perhaps the Netherlands appears to be …

The example I present here is a little silly, yet it illustrates how to join tables with data.table in R. Mapping old data to new data …

The early bird registration offer for the 2nd R in Insurance conference, 14 July 2014, at Cass Business School closes tomorrow. This …

The 10th Kölner R user meeting took place last Friday at the Institute of Sociology and to celebrate the anniversary we invited Andrie …

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 23 May 2014. To celebrate our 10th meeting we welcome: Andrie de …

Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) from Copenhagen was hilarious as usual with acts from all over Europe and some more or less …

At the end of March Google released a new version of the Chart Tools API with new options for point shapes and line brushes. The …

I am delighted to announce that the programme and abstracts for the second R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School in London, …

Last Thursday I had the pleasure to attend the Tokyo R user group meeting. And what a fun meeting it was! Over 40 R users had come …

GoogleVis 0.5.1 was released on CRAN yesterday. New Features New functions gvisSankey, gvisAnnotationChart, gvisHistogram, …

After my posts on timeline, Sankey and calendar charts, this will be the last to introduce new chart types of the developer version of …

My little series of posts about the new googleVis charts continues with calendar charts. Google’s calendar charts are still in beta, …

Sankey diagrams are great for visualising flows from one set of data values to another. Although named after Irish Captain Matthew …

Last year at the Google I/O conference Mitchell Foley presented new developments of the Google Chart Tools API and one of the new …

After nearly 4 years of developing googleVis on Google Code with SVN we decided to move to GitHub. The main reason was that Google …

Last week’s Cologne R user group meeting was all about R and databases. We had three talks from a generic overview on how to connect R …

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, 26 February 2014. We are delighted to welcome: Diego de Castillo: R …

Here is the poster for the 2nd R in Insurance conference on Monday 14 July 2014 at Cass Business School in London: R in Insurance …

The other day I had data that showed the development of many products over time. I grouped the products into categories and visualised …

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

What a great little device the Raspberry Pi is! After my initial setup it is time to play around with the input and output pins. The …

Recently the Guardian’s Data Blog reported about the results from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in the …

Rasmus’ post of last week on binomial testing made me think about p-values and testing again. In my head I was tossing coins, thinking …

Since Christmas I have been playing around with a Raspberry Pi. It is certainly not the fastest computer, but what a great little toy! …

I noticed that the monthly number of posts on R-bloggers stopped increasing over the last year. Indeed, the last couple of months saw a …

The Christmas and New Year’s break is over, yet there is still time to return unwanted presents. Return to Santa was the title of an …

Last week’s Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended so far. Well, we had a great line up indeed. Matt Dowle came over from …

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 13 December 2013. We are delighted to welcome: …

Following the very positive feedback that Andreas and I have received from delegates of the first R in Insurance conference in July of …

Following on from last week, where I presented a simple example of a Bayesian network with discrete probabilities to predict the number …

Here is a little Bayesian Network to predict the claims for two different types of drivers over the next year, see also example 16.15 …

In my previous post, I presented a preview version of googleVis that provided an integration with RStudio’s Viewer pane (introduced …

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 …

For most purposes PDF or other vector graphic formats such as windows metafile and SVG work just fine. However, if I plot lots of …

The Cologne R user group met last Friday for two talks on split apply combine in R and XLConnect by Bernd Weiß and Günter Faes …

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 18 October 2013. We will discuss and hear about the …

About half a year ago Ian Branagan, Chief Risk Officer of Renaissance Re - a Bermudian reinsurance company with a focus on property …

There can never be too many examples for transforming data with R. So, here is another example of reshaping a data.frame into a matrix. …

Changing the plotting width in bar-, column- and combo-charts of googleVis works identical and is defined by the bar.groupWidth …

Last Tuesday I attended the LondonR user group meeting, where Rich and Andy from Mango argued about the better package for multivariate …

The ave function in R is one of those little helper function I feel I should be using more. Investigating its source code showed me …

The guys at Google continue to update and enhance the Chart Tools API. One new recent feature is a pie chart with a hole, or as some …

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 …

Version 0.1.6 of the ChainLadder package has been released and is already available from CRAN. The new version adds the function …

I have a mid-2007 iMac with a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo processor and despite the fact that it is already six years old, it still does a good …

I posted about the various googleVis axis options for base charts, such as line, bar and area charts earlier, but I somehow forgot to …

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

Despite the hot weather and the beginning of the school holiday season in North Rhine Westphalia the Cologne R user group met yet again …

Yesterday the first R in Insurance conference took place at Cass Business School in London. I think the event went really well, but as …

The useR!2013 conference in Albacete, Spain, will commence next Wednesday, 10 July, and on the day before Diego and I will give a …

Last week I had the honour to give the opening keynote talk at the Talking Data South West conference, organised by the Exeter …

The Google Charts Tools provide two kinds of heat map charts for geographical data, the Flash based Geomap and the HTML5/SVG based …

Building R packages is not particular hard, but it can be a bit of a daunting endeavour at the beginning, particularly if you are more …

Following on from last week’s post, here are my slides on using googleVis on shiny from the Advanced R workshop at Lancaster …

Last week I was invited to give an introduction to googleVis at Lancaster University. This time I decided to use the R package slidify …

I was trained as a mathematician and it was only last year, when I attended the Royal Statistical Society conference and met many …

Over the last year I worked with two colleagues of mine on the subject of inflation and claims inflation in particular. I didn’t expect …

I am delighted to announce that the programme and abstracts for the first R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School in London, …

Often I like to reduce the alpha value (level of transparency) of colours to identify patterns of over-plotting when displaying lots of …

Our 5th Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended meeting so far, with 20 members finding their way to the Institute of …

At the last LondonR meeting Francine Bennett from Mastodon C shared some of her experience and findings from an analysis of a large …

Setting axis options in googleVis charts can be a bit tricky. Here I present two examples where I set several options to customise the …

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 12 April 2013. We will discuss cluster analysis and …

Be motivated. R has a steep learning curve. Find a problem you can’t solve otherwise. E.g. plotting multivariate data, a statistical …

Last week we released version 0.1.5-6 of the ChainLadder package on CRAN. The ChainLadder package provides statistical models, which …

The registration for the first R in Insurance is open and there is still time to submit a talk / lightning talk. The …

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 …

A friend of mine asked me the other day how she could use the function optim in R to fit data. Of course, there are built-in functions …

Documenting code can be a bit of a pain. Yet, the older (and wiser?) I get, the more I realise how important it is. When I was younger …

The guys at RStudio have done a fantastic job with shiny. It is really easy to build web apps with R using shiny. With the help of Joe …

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

The fourth Cologne R user meeting took place last Wednesday at the Institute of Sociology. Thanks to Bernd Weiß for hosting the event …

Quick reminder: The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, 6 February 2013. All details and the agenda are …

A friend of mine told me the secret of making money at the stock market. “It’s easy”, he said. All I would have to do is to buy a big …

This is the third post about Christofides’ paper on Regression models based on log-incremental payments [1]. The first post covered the …

Following on from last week’s post I will continue to go through the paper Regression models based on log-incremental payments by …

A recent post on the PirateGrunt blog on claims reserving inspired me to look into the paper Regression models based on log-incremental …

I really like gists as a quick way to include more lengthly code snippets into my blog posts. However, I am not a git user as such, and …

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 course, a picture on a computer monitor is a coloured plot of x and y coordinates or pixels. Still, I was smitten by David Sparks’ …

Last week I attended a seminar where a talk was given about the economic opportunities in the SAAAME (South-America, Asia, Africa and …

Lattice plots are a great way of displaying multivariate data in R. Deepayan Sarkar, the author of lattice, has written a fantastic …

I really should make it a habit of using data.table. The speed and simplicity of this R package are astonishing. Here is a simple …

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 …

I discussed earlier how the action potential of a neuron can be modelled via the Hodgkin-Huxely equations. Here I will present a simple …

I discovered an old classic game of mine again: Moon-buggy by Jochen Voss, based on the even older Moon Patrol, which celebrates its …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Source: Wikipedia, License: CC0 There is a wonderful cartoon by Loriot, a German humorist (1923 - 2011), about a couple sitting at …

The third Cologne R user meeting took place last Friday, 5 October 2012, at the Institute of Sociology. The evening was sponsored by …

If connecting data to the real world is the next sexy job, then how do I do this? And how do I connect the real world to R? It can be …

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for 5 October 2012. All details and the agenda are available on the KölnRUG Meetup …

Every year the UK’s general insurance actuarial community organises a big conference, which they call GIRO, short for General Insurance …

At last week’s Royal Statistical Society (RSS) conference Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, gave a panel talk about ‘Statistics at …

Today I feel very lucky, as I have been invited to the Royal Statistical Society conference to give a tutorial on interactive web …

The German news magazine Der Spiegel published a series of articles [1, 2] around career developments. The stories suggest that career …

Michael Bach, who is a professor and vision scientist at the University of Freiburg, maintains a fascinating site about visual …

The next version of the googleVis package has been released on the project site and CRAN. This version provides updates to the package …

The 100m mean’s sprint finals of the 2012 London Olympics are over and Usain Bolt won the gold medal again with a winning time of …

What is Rook? Rook is a web server interface for R, written by Jeffrey Horner, the author of rApache and brew. But unlike other web …

It is less than a week before the 2012 Olympic games will start in London. No surprise therefore that the papers are all over it, …

The other day I saw a fantastic exhibition of work by Bridget Riley. Karsten Schubert, who is Riley’s main agent, has a some of her …

The second Cologne R user meeting took place last Friday, 6 July 2012, at the Institute of Sociology. Thanks to Bernd Weiß, who …

At the R in Finance conference Paul Teetor gave a fantastic talk about Fast(er) R Code. Paul mentioned the common higher-order function …

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 …

One of the great research papers of the 20th century celebrates its 60th anniversary in a few weeks time: A quantitative description of …

This evening I will talk about Dynamical systems in R with simecol at the LondonR meeting. Thanks to the work by Thomas Petzoldt, …

Transforming data sets with R is usually the starting point of my data analysis work. Here is a scenario which comes up from time to …

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 …

Tonight I will give a talk at the Cambridge R user group about googleVis. Following my good experience with knitr and RStudio to create …

John D. Cook gave a great talk about ‘Why and how people use R’. The talk resonated with me and highlighted why R is such a great tool …

Last Saturday I met the guys from RStudio at the R in Finance conference in Chicago. I was curious to find out what RStudio could …

Waterfall charts are sometimes quite helpful to illustrate the various moving parts in financial data, particularly when I have …

Office building in Brüssel. Photo Markus Gesmann It is not unusual that you will not have admin rights in an IT controlled office …

The Guardian published a nice summary and link collection of an interdisciplinary visualisation workshop hosted by Microsoft dedicated …

How do you apply one particular row of your data to all other rows? Today I came across a data set which showed the revenue split by …

The first Kölner R user meeting was great fun. About 20 useRs had turned up to exchange their ideas, questions and experience with R. …

How can I embed a small data set into my R code? That was the question I came across today, when I prepared my talk about Dynamical …

The other day I found some old basic code I had written about 15 years ago on a Mac Classic II to plot the Feigenbaum diagram for the …

The data of the World Bank is absolutely amazing. I had said this before, but their updated iPhone App gives me a reason to return to …

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) worked together with OpenDataCity to create an online train monitor of the German …

The guys behind the Google Visualisation API don’t seem to rest. On 22 February 2012 they released an update of their API. Google added …

Am 30. März 2012 möchte ich gerne das erste Kölner R Benutzer Treffen organisieren. Ich habe an den Treffen in London in den vergangen …

I had mentioned the Guardian’s data blog and the need for more data journalism earlier here. What I really like about the Guardian’s …

David Chan from City University is organising an interdisciplinary symposium on tackling the ‘Big Data’ challenge on 1 March 2012. It …

During my university time I worked on the IT help desk for a while. One day I received a call from a professor, who said that his …

The other day I wrote about the R functions by, apply and friends, which allow me to operate on subsets of data. All those functions …

Version 0.2.14 of the googleVis package was released on CRAN today. Changes The help files have been checked against changes of the …

I am amazed by the number of comments I received on my recent blog entry about “by”, “apply” and friends. I had started my post by …

R is a language, as Luis Apiolaza pointed out in his recent post. This is absolutely true, and learning a programming language is not …

The financial crisis has put a lot of pressure on countries’ long-term foreign currency credit ratings, with France recently being …

Why the old and the new need to share time together It takes time to appreciate the new. Even if the new is much better than the old. …

Many thanks to all who participated in the survey about writing R package vignettes. Following my post last Thursday the responses …

I am currently co-writing the vignette for the ChainLadder package and wonder what I should be focusing on. I have co-written the …

Over the years I convinced my colleagues and IT guys that LaTeX/XeLaTeX is the way forward to produce lots of customer reports with …

On 7th December Google published a new version of their Visualisation API. The new version adds a new chart type: Stepped Area Chart …

We need more data journalism. How else will we find the nuggets of data and information worth reading? Life should become easier for …

The London R user group met again last Wednesday at the Shooting Star pub. And it was busy. More than 80 people had turned up. Was it …

Fitting distribution with R is something I have to do once in a while, but where do I start? A good starting point to learn more about …

Data analysis is often an iterative and interactive process. However, when I present about this subject, I feel often limited by the …

Today we published version 0.1.5-1 of the ChainLadder package for R. It provides methods which are typically used in insurance claims …

My 12" iBook G4 is celebrating its 8th birthday today! Time for a little present. How about R 2.14.0? The iBook is still in daily …

Using R with LaTeX via Sweave is a great way to create reproducible output. However, using specific fonts, e.g. your corporate fonts, …

How many R related books have been published so far? Who is the most popular publisher? How many other manuals, tutorials and books …

Following on from my article about accessing and plotting World Bank data with R I want to talk about how to change the initial view of …

Over the past couple of days I played around with the data sets of the World Bank, and I have to admit that I am blown away by it. It …

It seems that you cannot include Google Visualisation Charts into a blog post directly. So, I tried to include the output of a …

On 7 September 2011 I attended the London R user group meeting. It was a very good turn out with about 50 attendees at the Shooting …

Today we published googleVis 0.2.9 on CRAN. The new version updates the package for the new features of the Google Visualisation API …