Description: Hybrids of the soft computing SC technologies have been applied to market forecasting and trading rules, and in many cases have demonstrated better performance than competing approaches. The purpose of this research is to investigate a representative group of these applications and to document the manner in which hybrids of the SC technologies were implemented.

Description: Explores the open vs. closed systems debate with regards to actuarial modeling and exposes the over-simplification. Valuable for anyone who uses models.

Description: The article provides several examples of projects led by actuaries who are applying advanced data analytics and big data to solve industry-specific business problems.

Description: Using Healthcare Claims Data to Create Actuarial Models.

Description: Recurrence relations arise naturally in life contingencies for 2 reasons - the aggregate law of mortality, which relates the distribution of the future life times of 2 insureds, if one of them and the other is that most life insurance products can be constructed as a portfolio of 2 basic product types. We use the above simple idea and the extra freedom provided by the fractional age distribution to reveal a structure behind some common recursions. The structure has obvious pedagogical value. More interestingly, a software based on it has been implemented which facilitates actuarial computing.

Description: A new health insurance pricing model takes external market prices into account, as well as regulatory rate restrictions and other traditional pricing factors. Rather than being assumed at the outset, lapse rates emerge from the model, along with assessment spiral & loss ratio projections. Under the model optimal pricing strategy depends on whether the class being rated has a healthier than average mix of risks.

Description: The guest editorial details some valuable lessons during the author’s career as an employee benefits (mostly retirement) consultant, turned P&C predictive modeling, reporting and data warehousing lead, turned an analytic strategist and independent consultant.

Description: The author recounts his experience as a keynote speaker at the Actuarial Research Conference and provides advice to young actuaries to present complex subjects in an understandable manner.

Description: October 2015 issue of CompAct, the technology section's member benefit newsletter.

Description: This article introduces SymPy, a computer algebra system (CAS) for the Python programming language.