Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

Post by klelatti » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:03 AM UTC

Jwilcoxdata wrote: post #99

I’m surprised that there aren’t more comments about utilizing R AND Python for analysis work. These two languages actually commingle fairly well, you can build in RStudio if you like that flavor and still import Python packages to use in R code. We do a significant amount of modeling and analysis on large data sets from a variety of disparate sources and utilizing several different packages have extended this out to…

Post by sam_bristow » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

yold__ wrote: post #26

I'm a research actuary working in reinsurance. Here is why I think Python creates more problems than it solves from the standpoint of most insurance business users: 1.) Environment management. There are many solutions for managing python dependencies, my favorite is Docker + pip. Good luck getting actuaries and underwriters to write Dockerfiles etc, and good luck getting I.T. to support Docker on Windows desktops. Li…

Post by etothepii » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:11 AM UTC

will_pseudonym wrote: post #74

yold__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a couple years since I've used it, and I didn't feel it was a comparable alternative. It's decent for about 80% of spreadsheet users, but the keyboard shortcuts were lacking and it was missing some functions that I rely on. For keyboard shortcuts, most Excel power users don't use the mouse, so while it sound trivial, it's really hard to feel productive when you have to hunt around for the right button to cl…

> From an enterprise perspective, Excel is so entrenched it would be a 5-10 year effort to port existing spreadsheets to sheets. Practically speaking, most companies wouldn't see the benefit. And at the end of the day, it would have worse performance than Excel both in calculation speed and _much_ worse UI. One of the reasons Excel is so much better than Sheets is speed. Insurance companies spend hundreds of thousand…

Post by andi999 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:17 AM UTC

yold__ wrote: post #98

solresol wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't annotating these functions with @functools.lru_cache(10000000) work?

First of all, let me say that I've tried it :) Your recursion needs to "bottom-out" in order for that to work. If you don't get a stack overflow / out of memory error, you're good. But bear in mind that there will be thousands of stack frames. Before you get to time=0 (the recursive base case) in a long-term liability actuarial calc. The recursion isn't simple like the Fibonacci sequence . It's more like: f(t+1) = if…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:23 AM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #57

meztez wrote: post #50

I'm pushing for our actuarial team to transition to more R + Git. After 3 years of preaching, most of the actuaries now use RStudio + git as their primary work tool. It is happening. What we did : 1) Provide documentation on everything from install to using internal R libraries for ETL. 2) Provide mostly problem free, always updated VMs with RStudio Server/ Shiny Server. 3) Establish an hotline channel for instant he…

I'm an actuary with a strong interest in this area - would be very interested to hear more especially on your R vs Python experience.