Introduction to R Programming for Actuaries
A beginner's guide to using R for actuarial analysis, covering setup, key packages, and first projects.
Getting Started with R
R is a free, open-source programming language widely used in statistics and data science. For actuaries, R offers powerful tools for loss reserving, mortality modeling, GLM-based pricing, and data visualization. To begin, install R from CRAN and RStudio as your development environment. The tidyverse collection of packages (dplyr, ggplot2, tidyr) provides a consistent framework for data manipulation and visualization. Learning R's vector-based operations is key to writing efficient code.
Actuarial Packages and First Projects
The ChainLadder package implements standard reserving methods including chain ladder, Bornhuetter-Ferguson, and Mack's model. The actuar package provides actuarial-specific probability distributions and credibility theory functions. The lifecontingencies package handles life contingencies calculations. A good first project is replicating a reserving analysis you have already done in Excel, which lets you compare results while learning the syntax. Building visualizations of loss triangles and development patterns with ggplot2 demonstrates R's advantages over spreadsheet-based charting.