Contribute

[odddkidout]

Hi Gene,
This Project is Awesome and like one of the projects i worked on in an internship last year. i want to contribute to it.
Can you guide me to the roadmap you are following for this project? i would like to have a look at it
:)

[genedan]

Hey @odddkidout,

The closest thing I have to a roadmap might be the issues section:

https://github.com/casact/FASLR/issues

Things are at a very early stage so I would expect the FASLR gui to change quite rapidly so it may be some time before the design and vision of the software as a whole stabilizes. Usually, I cycle between the following tasks depending on my mood and what I think is feasible to accomplish:

• Incorporating new features from the chainladder package
• Incorporating concepts from the Friedland paper
• Improving the FASLR interface
• Working on the database backend

But for now I think what I'm curious about is whether people can actually launch the main.py file on their computers. At least to my knowledge I have been the only person to have run it.

Otherwise, I think there ought to be a lot more well-defined things to help with over at the chainladder page:

https://github.com/casact/chainladder-python/issues

This package has a more mature documentation that you can read through to learn how to use and then help out with. As this project depends heavily on chainladder, helping out over there will also help me out as well.

Thanks!

[jbogaardt]

I've been able to run it on windows off the pyqt6 branch. The main branch has some pathing issues when loading samples. When I update those, I can run that one too. In both cases, I can only see basic triangles, I can't see any of the richness of ldf selection on your blog.

[genedan]

@jbogaardt what kind of pathing issues did you discover and what changes did you make? To view the blog example, there's a file called factor_demo.py which has it.

[genedan]

I've added a contributing guide via 1aa89f6, you can see that in the CONTRIBUTING.md file which describes the development environment and can help with the setup.

@odddkidout, I think I was able to replicate the importation issues you faced in #60. Via the original readme instructions, you may have tried to do the following:

I made another commit 0e52479 which allows you to run the main.py module as a script. If you have a virtual environment activated, you can execute the main.py module from the FASLR directory by typing in python -m faslr.main:

I have updated the readme file to reflect this. Let me know if that works for you, if not we can refine the guide further.

[odddkidout]

Its working as you mentioned. You should add this in the readme.md

[jbogaardt]

When running from master I received the following error on startup:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'faslr/samples/friedland_us_industry_auto.csv'

I bypassed the error in sample.py with:

...
path = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
if sample_name == "us_industry_auto":
    df_csv = pd.read_csv(
        os.path.join(path, "..", "samples", "friedland_us_industry_auto.csv"))
elif sample_name == "xyz":
    df_csv = pd.read_csv(
        os.path.join(path, "..", "samples", "friedland_xyz_auto_bi.csv"))
...

[genedan]

Cool, @jbogaardt would you like to make a pull request for that or is it alright if I just incorporate that directly?

[genedan]

Hey @odddkidout, I see that you've been browsing the issues - so if anything there piques your interest or if you are going to be working on something, please let me know so I can assign the issue to you. Otherwise, I may already be working on some of these things and I wouldn't want you to spend a bunch of effort only to have it be overridden by something I did or to have it broken because I had plans to change some of the underlying dependencies of your work.

For example, the schema will change drastically in the near future - we've got lots of stuff to add like project metadata and premium/loss information so I wouldn't want your efforts in #60 to be invalidated due to any changes in plans on my end (although I think for this one PR we can work to get it merged in). If you give me a heads up on where you want to contribute, I can let you know whether the part of the codebase you wish to contribute to is stable enough to accept a pull request.

@jbogaardt, do you have any tips on how to avoid having people accidentally work on the same parts of the codebase or duplicate work? I can put these ideas in the contributing guide.

[odddkidout]

to be honest, i can work on any side whether it be GUI related or actuarial model related, i am here to learn the core reserving techniques more thoroughly while working at them. so you can make a priority list of issue and enhancement. ill pick to work on them in the same order if that's cool?

[jbogaardt]

do you have any tips on how to avoid having people accidentally work on the same parts of the codebase or duplicate work?

You're doing the right things. Communication is key. Github has a lot of tools for that. Heavier work warrants meeting with collaborators to brainstorm and align on design approach. Test suites will save the code base more times than you can count and this is even more true with additional collaborators. This project is still very young with lots of design decisions yet to be made. That makes communication that much more important. Delegate issues with smaller project footprints to new collaborators first - they'll more likely create a successfull PR which makes everyone happy.

[odddkidout]

Hi @genedan ,

Can I work on exhibit reserving views? since I am new to GI reserving that will help me understand the work better?

[genedan]

Feel free to pitch in. The main place for these is the methods folder, which contains one module per method. So you can add methods by making your own modules here. Right now I only have one method, the development method. You can use that as a a guide on how to get started with other methods. I'm currently working on the expected loss method, fyi.

The other relevant folder is the demos folder, which contains standalone files you can execute to see how individual widgets work. When you create a method, you can make demo examples in this folder to test out your method as you work on it.

[genedan]

Hey @odddkidout, I know you wanted a space to chat, so let's give gitter a try, let me know if this works for you:

https://matrix.to/#/#faslr:gitter.im