Description: This session will cover clustering techniques generally (k-means, hierarchical), and how k-means have been used to segment policyholders using third party features such as credit scores to assess customer profitability.

Description: Python is the leading programming language for data science. Python programming is one skill that actuaries should acquire. It facilitates analytic work, and the available visualization tools help to communicate ideas. In this article, I use a traditional actuarial problem, mortality modeling, as an example.

Description: A review of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization courses with special emphasis on how they may be useful to actuaries.

Description: Data science and predictive analytics are rapidly growing fields and the tools are evolving at a formidable pace. The actuary who wants to be most effective will most likely have to learn at least the basics of more than one programming language, such as R, Python, or Julia, depending on the problem at hand. The Jupyter Notebook App allows you to create interactive notebook documents that are relatively language agnostic, so you only need to learn a single integrated development environment. More importantly, Jupyter Notebooks allows you to easily combine input (code), output (including visualizations), and documentation in a single, shareable, document. Learn how to make better use of your time with these very useful notebooks. This demonstration-based talk will also cover JupyterLab, the next generation of notebooks.

Description: We're introducing a new “cutting edge” wealth accumulation predictive framework, the predictive equity analytics (PEA) for life products (annuity, insurance, group employer benefits, retirement plan). PEA enables life insurers and policyholders to avoid market downturns and capture returns from equities (stocks, ETFs and mutual funds) predicted to increase in next one to three trade days via fund prediction advisory by insurers, additionally by individual policyholders. The capability does not exist in insurance markets nor in financial intermediary markets.

Description: Read the April 2019 issue of Predictive Analytics & Futurism published by the Predictive Analytics & Futurism Section of the Society of Actuaries.

Description: We compare two predictive analytics methods - GLM and GBM in terms of predictiveness vs. interpretability.

Description: Often actuarial practitioners are faced with working with data that is less than ideal. The data may be observed with gaps in it, a model may suggest variables that are observed at different frequencies, and sometimes predictive analytic results are very fragile to the inclusion or omission of just a few observations in the sample. Data, particularly big data, are often "messy" and something must be done about it. What is the actuary to do about these very practical matters? These types of questions are what this presentation is intended to address. Concerns on missing data, outliers, nonlinearity, mixed-frequency, cross-correlations are illustrated using real datasets in the Asia-Pacific countries. Some possible solutions to the messy data problems will be discussed.

Description: Description of methods for extracting and reformatting the existing mortality tables using R. Methods and formats for storage are discussed in the second article. Intent is to generate discussion regarding the format of our stored mortality tables. Value is in the demonstration of task automation in R and in the reduction of duplicate work across companies related to reformatting tables.

Description: Gather with members and non-members in the China actuarial community to discuss recent topics and related issues in areas such as macroeconomic sharing, pension, investment, product strategy, and more.