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.
Here I have a data frame that shows incremental claim payments over time for different loss occurrence (origin) years.
The format of the data frame above is how this kind of data is usually stored in a data base. However, I would like to see the payments of the different origin years in rows of a matrix.
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 it to be such a challenging topic, but we ended up with more questions than answers. The key question and biggest challenge is to define what inflation, or indeed claims inflation actually is and how to measure it. We published a summary of our thoughts and findings in this month’s issue of The Actuary.