Description: Increasing technology is available to create and disseminate educational resources worldwide. In response, this article advocates creation of open educational resources (OERs) that will benefit the actuarial profession with both recruitment and retention of members. Specifically, we describe OER contributions made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and more recently through the ASTIN Academy, a working group of ASTIN, the non-life section of the International Actuarial Association. We advocate pushing boundaries and creating new ways of teaching effectively for the future. The innovative use of technology and open-source materials is a way to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the actuarial profession.

Description: This summary is intended to provide the pension actuary with guidance in interpreting and using the termination and retirement information in the 2003 SOA Pension Plan Termination and Retirement Study. The tables in the study were developed based on 1.7 million life years of data from 112 plans collected primarily from actuarial consulting firms for the period 1995 – 2000.

Description: Automobile insurers classify the risks that they underwrite in order to subdivide the portfolio into classes of risks with similar profiles. While some insurers may have sufficient historical data, several others may not have significant volume of experience data in order to produce reliable claims predictions to help enhance their risk classification systems. A database containing a pooled experience of several insurers thereby helps to produce a more fair, reliable, and equitable premium structure for all risks concerned. This paper uses multilevel models to analyze the data on claim counts provided by the General Insurance Association of Singapore, an organization consisting of most of the general insurers in Singapore. The multilevel nature of the data is due to the following: a certain vehicle is observed over a period of years and is insured by a particular insurance company under a certain 'fleet' policy. The authors show how intercompany data lead to a priori premiums and a posteriori corrections to these initial premiums. Specific focus is made in understanding the intercompany effects using various count distribution models [Poisson, negative binomial, zero–inflated and hurdle Poisson]. The performance of these various models is compared the authors also investigate how to use the historical claims of a company, fleet and/or vehicle in order to correct for the premium initially set.

Description: This article discusses Jed Frees’ book in progress, “Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications” which offers a synthesized introduction to regression and time series.

Description: This paper introduces actuaries to the concept of 'copulas,' a tool for understanding relationships among multivariate outcomes. A copula is a function that links univariate marginals to their full multivariate distribution. Recently, there has been a rapidly developing literature on the statistical properties and applications of copulas. This paper explores some of these practical applications, including estimation of joint life mortality and multidecrement models. In addition, the paper describes basic properties of copulas, their relationships to measures of dependence and several families of copulas that have appeared in the literature. This paper will also be useful to those who wish to use copulas for statistical inference. Statistical inference procedures are illustrated using insurance company data on losses and expenses. For this data, the paper shows how to fit copulas and describes their usefulness by pricing a reinsurance contract and estimating expenses for pre-specified losses.

Description: Summary of the SOA's Annuity Valuation with Dependent Mortality research report which examines the standard industry practice of assuming independent lives for insurance products that cover multiple lives.

Description: This presentation develops a micro–level stochastic model for the run–off of automobile insurance claims. The analysis uses policy exposure, claims and payments experience data from vehicle insurance portfolios obtained from a major general insurance company in Singapore. The data are from the General Insurance Association 'GIA' of Singapore, an organization comprising most of the general insurers in Singapore. Modelling the run–off of individual Reported But Not Settled [RBNS] claims is the very aim of the work. The presenters focus on the following components of the development process: the time to an event, the conditional event type, the conditional payment type if any, and the conditional severity if any. They distinguish three types of events: settlement without any payments made during development, settlement with a payment and a payment without settlement. Given that a payment is to be made, the conditional payment type model describes the probability that it will be one of three claim types, or any possible combination of them. The conditional severity component describes the claim amount structure according to the combination of types paid. The presenters provide appropriate statistical models for each component and calibrate them to the available data. These building blocks are consequently used to predict the future development of open RBNS claims.

Description: This paper focuses on the fact that life and annuity reserves that are determined from discounted case flows mask the dynamic nature of interest rates. To study this effect in a stochastic interest environment, the authors look at a change in discounted reserves. By looking at the appropriate measure of change, the paper explores potential short-term consequences of changes in the interest environment.

Description: This paper introduces density estimation for functions of observations. The nonparametric density estimates are introduced and certain computational issues are discussed and a central limit theorem for the estimator is provided. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, VOL. 1.

Description: This paper addresses the extension of the theory of life contingencies to a stochastic interest environment and its application to solvency valuation and surplus. A discussion of the paper follows. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1990, Vol. 42.