Description: Description of the vast variety of predictive analytics topics covered by the Forecasting & Futurism section and introduction to the July 2015 issue of the newsletter.

Description: Neural networks have fallen only to rise again twice. The latest incarnation borrows much from the past but adds elements to support deep learning. This article demonstrates the state of the art in deep neural network programming.

Description: History of Big Data, and approaches to cope with it. The author suggests that actuaries have been using similar methods for a long time; but need to get up to speed on the newer terms and variations.

Description: Short descriptions of the various articles in the June issue.

Description: Editorial and issue introduction

Description: Summary of the first annual predictive analytics (PA) symposium specifically targeted to help actuaries get into PA & to take it to the next level of expertise.

Description: Process of building a predictive model and related considerations.

Description: This article describes a method that can be useful when re-fitting a risk score model to a population of only moderate size. Learn how to use concepts like ridge regression to train a model with partial credibility.

Description: This article describes the use of artificial society modeling to gauge the effect of insurance agent population and effectiveness on individual life insurance sales. This is part of an ongoing effort to extend the use of one type of agent-based modeling beyond health care, but is far from a practical application at this point.

Description: Summary of the July, 2013 newsletter with an executive overview of each article.