The MBBEFD Distribution After two years, the MBBEFDLite package for R is finally mature! As a brand-new actuary, in my first job, I had the privilege of working with Dr. Stefan Bernegger at Swiss Reinsurance. Albeit I did not have much to do with him—I was a one-exam, no experience new actuary and he was Read the full article…
With the sad passing of Dr. Nick Higham, I remembered that he commented on one of my blog posts. However, when I tried to access the post, I received a critical WordPress error. It turns out that the papercite package is unsupported for modern WordPress. I therefore switched to using teachPress. While not exactly the Read the full article…
After much deliberation, I have updated my personal R code style guide to no longer mandate functions begin with uppercase letters. While I still feel there is value in being able immediately differentiate functions from variables, too much of base R does not follow that convention and one loses more than one gains in enforcing Read the full article…
For my handful of followers, you may have noticed something strange. Over the past two days, I released updates to all four of my packages on CRAN. I decided to practice what I preach and actively reduce dependency hell by moving from testhat to tinytest. I have been programming for over 20 years, and continue Read the full article…
This post outlines the steps needed for building R 4.2 for Windows with OpenBLAS using the the new Rtools42 build system. With the soon-to-be released new UCRT toolchain for building R on Windows, the build process changes once again. First and foremost, we Windows users owe a deep debt of gratitude first to Duncan Murdoch Read the full article…
This post outlines the steps needed to build R 4+ for Windows with OpenBLAS. The release of R 4.0 includes significant changes to the Windows build system from prior versions—for the better! Before anything, we all owe Jeroen Ooms significant gratitude for the many hours he spent working on the build system. Thank you, Jeroen!! Read the full article…
Searching for Speed In my previous post, I described the method I use for compiling Fortran (or C) into an R package using the .Call interface. This post will compare the speed of various implementations of the layer loss cost function. The Function Often, insurance or reinsurance is bought in stratified horizontal layers. For example, Read the full article…
Searching for Speed Everyone who has ever used R has, at one time or another, wished for an increase in R’s speed. If you haven’t, you’re not using R hard enough! Recently, as part of some research on credibility, I was calculating layer loss costs for millions of simulated loss observations. As I progressed, the Read the full article…
Recently, the R-consortium accepted a new project called histoRicalg. The main goal of the project is to document and transfer knowledge of some older algorithms used by R and by other computational systems. There is a lot of R written in Fortran—much of which is in the old F77 format—and in C whose original implementations Read the full article…
You may have noticed that this blog has been acting weirdly over the past month or so. Unfortunately, I was hacked with some form of the Asian Script/Japanese Keyword hack, and it took a while and some professional help to thoroughly clean up the databases and files. I’m not completely certain how control of my Read the full article…