 Hi everyone, it's MJ, the fellow Actree, and in this video I want to review R for Actrees and Data Scientist with Applications to Insurance. This is a new book written by Brian Fannin, who is a research Actree at the Casualty Actuarial Society, and it is published by Actex Learning, and they've actually got a lovely website with a whole bunch of Actuarial resources. This book is about R, and for those of you who know, I have a course on new to me called R in RStudio for Beginners, but it's very much just a quick introduction. This textbook is the next step, so everybody's been saying, Mike, you know, when you're gonna release more R content, well before I get to that, this textbook could be great for you. So what I want to do in this review is answer four questions. I want to see who is it for, what's inside, should you get it, and how do you go about buying it? So let's jump straight into it. Who is it for? And there are three people who I think it is for. The very first is the student-actress. Why? Because you've got a couple of exams that you have to write in R, and because this is quite a new addition to the syllabus, there's not that many past papers, and therefore this book is gonna be great for studying and for practicing various assignments and getting you exam ready for the R component. It's also great if you're a data scientist. So this means you're working or you want to work in the insurance sector, but you don't want to go through all the hassle of writing all those millions of actual exams. You know, you just want to get straight to making models and working with data. Now this book is gonna be great because it's gonna help you to understand the jargon in the insurance world, and it's going to be very specific to your work. Yes, there's lots of other resources, but this one is for insurance. So if you want to be a data scientist in the insurance sector, this is the book you want to be looking for. And finally, this is also for fellow actress. Like I said, the introduction of R is fairly new to the syllabus, and many of us might not have done it at university. Now R is an amazing tool that can assist with our work. And in this book, there are lots of exercises and examples that are meaningful to us actress because it's around the insurance sector. So it's a great book to get you started, and it will push you beyond the basics so that you can start seeing results and using these tools in the workplace. So what's inside this book? And I'm gonna have a couple of screenshots towards the end of the video, but let's maybe go through some of the contents. So there's a whole part on getting started, then there's two parts on data, there's a part of models, and then the final part is around the workflow. Now when it comes to getting started, you know, this is stuff like installing and exploring our probability functions, data types, which is all things that I've got in my Udemy course, but this is just nicely written in the in a textbook style. And it also includes elements of the language, which is brilliant, especially if this is your first time coming to any form of programming language, the getting started really helps you and introduces you to the whole coding experience. We then have data and data we will learn how to access data from, you know, let's say, Excel or SQL databases or wherever you're getting your data from, then some data wrangling just to make sure that your data is prepared in the way that your models want them to be. And then the textbook looks a little bit at various data types, you know, you've got your simple vectors, and then you've got lists, then you've got your more advanced data frames. And the book goes through explaining what each of these things are so that you can, you know, actually use them and start building your models. Then there's a whole bunch of chapters on data visualization and a whole chapter dedicated to GG plots to so that when you are making models and you are communicating your results, you can make everything look great with these amazing data visualization tools that comes with R. And then, of course, because it's very actuarial and it's in the insurance sector, one of the things that we love to do as actuaries is fitting loss distributions to the data. And there's a whole chapter dedicated on how to do that in this book. Then when we come to the models, well, what's lovely is that all the sample data is related to the insurance industry. So it's going to make sense it's going to be meaningful to our profession. And then some of the models that they go through some like simple linear models like regression, they're more generalized linear models, then there's a whole bunch of stuff on credibility, as well as more sophisticated things like tree based models that like I say is quite a new thing, and specifically in the actuarial syllabus. And then the final part is around workflow. This is how to pre process your data, selecting the right model documentation, which is critical. And of course, communicating your results. This is also a an actuarial exam in many of the societies is dedicated around communication. So this book is going to also help with that. So with that said, let's ask the next big question. Should you get it? And like all actual answers, it depends. Okay, one of the reasons why you might not want to get it is because it is quite expensive, specifically for us in South Africa, with our currency changing to dollars. This is quite a heavy price tag. And especially when you consider that there is a whole bunch of other resources on our on the internet for free. It's like, wow, there really is a premium that you have to pay for it. So if you are a little bit tight on the budget, you might want to stay away for it. Although I always recommend that you invest in yourself invest in your education. So try make a plan to get it. But I understand that this is quite a high price, specifically for the student act trees, the fellow act trees, we shouldn't be too worried about about these price tags. But this is maybe one of the drawbacks or cons of the book is that it can be a little bit pricey for students. Whereas, why I would highly recommend you get it is if you are stressed for time. And this means the exam is fast approaching, or you've got a project and work, and you don't have the luxury of going through all the free resources and trying to see which ones are good, which ones are bad, which ones relate to insurance, which ones don't. You know, if you don't have that luxury of time, then this is what this textbook is doing. It's kind of saving you a lot. And if you're in pressure for deadlines, then this is a must buy. So with that said, where can you go and you can buy it? Well, you can buy it at the actx learning website, as part of the Mad Rivers books. And I'll put a link in the description below so you guys can go straight to where the site is so that you can purchase this amazing book. And I think let's maybe end off by having a little sneak peek at what's inside. And some of the pictures you can see, there's really is a nice focus on data visualization, which is so important. All the code is put inside these gray boxes. So it's very easy to see what you want to copy and paste into our studio. If you want to just quickly, you know, get these models up and running. And it's you can see it's just laid out very well. I mean, it really is impressive going through this. I love these squiggles. And this is something that specifically the first time you approach are, it's very difficult to get your head around data visualization. So it's great that there's so many chapters on that in this textbook that allows us to get the most of this amazing tool. And then there's even these tree based models, random forests, all these fun things that you know, the data scientists are like, Oh, we're better than actually, because you know, we're learning all these things. Well, guess what? Actually, we can learn them to they're in this book, and they're going to help us to get the most out of this amazing resource called R. So at the end of the day, I would recommend this book. And I mean, I'm not the only actually to do that. If you go to the back cover, you can see there's a whole bunch of actually from various institutions, you know, they're saying things like this is perfect for newcomers. You know, all this book is very approachable. And this is the best resource I recommend to my students when they say how do I start learning R. So I would really, really recommend that if you can afford it, you get your hands on a copy of this book and start learning R. R is critical. It's the future for act trees. And yeah, let me know in the comment section below what you thought of it. And I'll see you guys soon for another video. Cheers.