Philippe J. S. De Brouwer - The Big R-Book

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: De Brouwer, Philippe J. S., author.

Title: The big R-book : from data science to learning machines and big data / Philippe J.S. De Brouwer.

Description: Hoboken, NJ, USA : Wiley, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019057557 (print) | LCCN 2019057558 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119632726 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119632764 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119632771 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: R (Computer program language)

Classification: LCC QA76.73.R3 .D43 2020 (print) | LCC QA76.73.R3 (ebook) | DDC 005.13/3–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057557

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057558

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Images: Information Tide series and Particle Geometry series

© agsandrew/Shutterstock, Abstract geometric landscape © gremlin/Getty Images, 3D illustration Rendering © MR.Cole_Photographer/Getty Images

To Joanna, Amelia and Maximilian

This book brings together skills and knowledge that can help to boost your career. It is an excellent tool for people working as database manager, data scientist, quant, modeller, statistician, analyst and more, who are knowledgeable about certain topics, but want to widen their horizon and understand what the others in this list do. A wider understanding means that we can do our job better and eventually open doors to new or enhanced careers.

The student who graduated froma science, technology, engineering ormathematics or similar program will find that this book helps to make a successful step from the academic world into a any private or governmental company.

This book uses the popular (and free) software R as leitmotif to build up essential programming proficiency, understand databases, collect data, wrangle data, buildmodels and select models froma suit of possibilities such linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, decision trees, multi criteria decision models, etc. and ultimately evaluate a model and report on it.

We will go the extra mile by explaining some essentials of accounting in order to build up to pricing of assets such as bonds, equities and options. This helps to deepen the understanding how a company functions, is useful to bemore result oriented in a private company, helps for one's own investments, and provides a good example of the theories mentioned before. We also spend time on the presentation of results and we use R to generate slides, text documents and even interactive websites! Finally we explore big data and provide handy tips on speeding up code.

I hope that this book helps you to learn faster than me, and build a great and interesting career.

Enjoy reading!

Philippe De Brouwer

2020

This book is accompanied by a companion website:

www.wiley.com/go/De Brouwer/The Big R-Book

The website includes materials for students and instructors:

The Student companion site will contain the R-code, and the Instructor companion site will contain PDF slides based on the book's content.

Dr. Philippe J.S. De Brouwer leads expert teams in the service centre of HSBC in Krakow, is Honorary Consul for Belgium in Krakow, and is also guest professor at the University of Warsaw, Jagiellonian University, and AGH University of Science and Technology. He teaches both at executive MBA programs and mathematics faculties.

He studied theoretical physics, and later acquired his second Master degree while working. Finishing thisMaster, he solved the “fallacy of large numbers puzzle” that was formulated by P.A. Samuelson 38 years before and remained unsolved since then. In his Ph.D., he successfully challenged the assumptions of the noble price winning “Modern portfolio Theory” of H. Markovitz, by creating “Maslowian Portfolio Theory.”

His career brought him into insurance, banking, investment management, and back to banking, while his specialization shifted from IT, data science to people management.

For Fortis (now BNP), he created one of the first capital guaranteed funds and got promoted to director in 2000. In 2002, he joined KBC, where he merged four companies into one and subsequently became CEO of the merged entity in 2005. Under his direction, the company climbed from number 11 to number 5 on the market, while the number of competitors increased by 50%. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, he helped creating a new assetmanager for KBC in Ireland that soon accommodated the management of ca. 1000 investment funds and had about =C120 billion under management. In 2012, he widened his scope by joining the risk management of the bank and specialized in statistics and numerical methods. Later, Philippe worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in London and specialized in Big Data, analytics and people management. In 2016, he joined HSBC and is passionate about building up a Centre of Excellence in risk management in the service centre in Krakow. One of his teams, the independent model review team, validates the most important models used in the banking group worldwide.

Married and father of two, he invests his private time in the future of the education by volunteering as board member of the International School of Krakow. Thisway, he contributes modestly to the cosmopolitan ambitions of Krakow. He gives back to society by assuming the responsibility of Honorary Consul for Belgium in Krakow, and mainly helps travellers in need.

In his free time, he teaches at the mathematics departments of AGH University of Science and Technology and Jagiellonian University in Krakow and at the executive MBA programs the Krakow Business School of the University of Economics in Krakow and the Warsaw University. He teaches subjects like finance, behavioural economics, decision making, Big Data, bank management, structured finance, corporate banking, financial markets, financial instruments, team-building, and leadership. What stands out is his data and analytics course: with this course he manages to provide similar content with passion for undergraduatemathematics students and experienced professionals of anMBAprogram. This variety of experience and teaching experience in both business and mathematics is what lays the foundations of this book: the passion to bridge the gap between theory and practice.