Mervyn Kopinsky, FSA, EA, MAAA

R is the most rapidly growing language used in the data science arena. The session will provide an introduction to using R and RStudio. (RStudio provides a simpler programming interface for running R than native R itself.)

We will cover how to load and use packages, different data types and basic R commands for programming, loading, summarizing and exploring data. We will then move on to preparing graphs of data and build some simple linear models with the data.

We highly recommend that you download R (https://www.r-project.org/) and RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com/) onto your computers before attending the session. It would also be helpful to download and unzip this dataset: https://www.soa.org/Files/Research/Projects/2017-gltd-recovery-mortality-tree-data.zip

Mervyn Kopinsky has more than 25 years’ experience working as a consulting pension actuary. Mervyn joined the Society of Actuaries during 2017 in a research position as an Experience Studies actuary. Mervyn is also currently involved in researching the application of Predictive Modeling techniques to large data sets. Mervyn is originally from South Africa where he graduated with an MSc. in statistics.