pasteFromExcel

Suppose you have a triangle in Excel that you would like to analyze in R. In Excel, select the cells comprising the triangle including the labels identifying accident year and age and copy to the clipboard.

AIM Matters

Props to my college roommate, Brian Conrey, who this summer celebrated the 20 year anniversary of the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM), a math "think tank" in Palo Alto, California. With the help of math enthusiast John Fry and a supportive board, AIM has discovered creative ways to generate mathematics research at all levels. For example, Math Teachers' Circles (MTCs) bring together middle school teachers and professional mathematicians around the country to work on interesting problems that help bolster the classroom skills of our early math instructors. AIM originated the SQuaREs program, an inventive way to gather researchers into concentrated week-long workshops, a fertile model that non-math disciplines could look to emulate. Science Nation recently highlighted AIM's partnership with Driscoll's (Watsonville CA) and other berry growers that modeled various water and land management techniques for balancing aquifer levels ("Strawberry fields forever - with some help from mathematicians!”).

This week the Frys.com Open golf tournament takes place at the Silverado Resort and Spa in Napa, California. Besides volunteering as Shotlink operators, AIM supporters will also be manning a booth. Come on by to learn more and meet some nice mathematicians!

Implementing CLFM with the ChainLadder Package

One of the requirements of the popular stochastic reserving method known as the Mack Method (see for example Dr. Mack's original paper, Murphy's original paper, Barnett & Zehnwirth, and others) is that the actuary select one of the "standard" averages, such as the simple or volume-weighted averages of the observed link ratios. If an actuary's selection differs from one of those then -- strictly speaking -- the results of the papers above do not apply.