At the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.casact.org/calendar/index.cfm?fa=eventView&id=1453">Ratemaking and Product Management</a> (RPM) seminar of the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.casact.org/">Casualty Actuarial Society</a> (CAS) in San Diego last month, Linda Brobeck, Peggy Brinkmann, and yours truly gave a concurrent session on a machine learning technique called <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree_learning">decision tree analysis</a>. See the DSPA-2 session -- and other sessions -- at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.casact.org/education/rpm/2017/index.cfm?fa=presentations">this link</a>. Technical issues precluded showing the video of  installing and running Rattle within RStudio. Thus this post.<br><br>As Peggy notes, installing and running Rattle takes only three &quot;commands&quot; in R:<br><div><span>  install.packages(&quot;rattle&quot;, dependencies=c('Depends', &quot;Suggests&quot;))<p></p></span></div><div><span>  library(rattle)<p></p></span></div><span>  rattle()</span><br><br>Although not necessary, the &quot;Suggests&quot; option above can avoid Rattle's annoying requests for more packages as you click through its GUI; the downside is the time to download and install about 900 packages. Below (&quot;Read more >>&quot;) is a link to a video of me running through the three lines above:<br><a target="_blank" href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B82rVboXnsUgd1FhRFl0MFRHRUU/view?usp=sharing"></a><br><a name="more"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B82rVboXnsUgd1FhRFl0MFRHRUU/view?usp=sharing">download/install Rattle</a><br><div><p></p></div><br><div>For those whose IT departments restrict installing R and RStudio on company equipment, this presentation used the software on a USB drive. The first minute or so of the video shows me setting up the shortcut on the USB drive so RStudio runs without a bunch of confusing questions, especially for a newbie. If you have R and RStudio installed on your computer already, you can fast forward through the first minute. </div><div><p></p></div><div><br></div><div>Peggy put her three lines of code into a script called ‘Rattle.R’. That’s the file I double-click around the 1:10 mark. You can see the three lines of the script in the upper left pane of RStudio. <p></p></div><div><br></div><div>I run the first line starting at 8:17 am, which finishes at 9:32 am (the 1:42 mark in the video). Plenty of time to read the newspaper.<p></p></div><div><br></div><div>Then I run the second line which, despite the “Depends” and “Suggests” settings above, has to download and install yet another package, GTK+. (There are reasons why that’s necessary, but not important right now.) That takes just a few minutes.<p></p></div><div><br></div><div>Then I run the third line, which fires up the Rattle user interface (GUI). It’s a little hard to see, but the Rattle GUI shows up as another process running in the taskbar.<p></p></div><div><br></div><div>At this point you can start using rattle/rpart per Peggy’s presentation. The links to our three presentations are reproduced here for convenience:<p></p></div><div>   <a target="_blank" href="http://www.casact.org/education/rpm/2017/presentations/DSPA-2_1.pdf">Linda Brobeck</a></div><div>   <a target="_blank" href="http://www.casact.org/education/rpm/2017/presentations/DSPA-2_2.pdf">Peggy Brinkmann</a></div><div>   <a target="_blank" href="http://www.casact.org/education/rpm/2017/presentations/DSPA-2_3.pdf">Dan Murphy</a></div><div><br></div><br><div>Contact me if questions.<p></p></div>