Description: Feature article describing how exponential technologies will affect the actuarial profession.

Description: The Possible Role of Convolutional Neural Networks in Mortality Risk Protection

Description: Actuarial concepts of credibility can be extended to encompass additional information provided by new machine learning estimates. New statistical ideas also indicate how to generalize to blend arbitrarily many estimators, while not double-counting common information. For example, historical claim costs and risk scores both leverage diagnosis code information. We introduce two new estimators, one based on partial correlation and the other based on the machine learning-derived Shapley statistic, to address these limitations.

Description: Read the June issue of Predictive Analytics & Futurism published by the Predictive Analytics & Futurism Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: A discussion on how the look of charts and graphs can affect comprehension of data.

Description: Editorial for the May 2019 issue of Predictive Analytics & Futurism newsletter.

Description: In Complexity: A Guided Tour, readers are given a short history lesson on the roots of dynamical systems theory, chaos and prediction.

Description: A significant fraction of insurance risk is characterized by the tail of the claims distribution, where we have much less data to model probabilities accurately. Ignoring the tails can lead to underpricing of tail risk and mispricing. Estimation of the tails can be complex due to a bias-variance tradeoff--the further out we go into the tail the more accurately we can model the extreme tail (lower bias) but the less data we have (increased variance). The statistical tools of Extreme Value Theory can be leveraged to more accurately estimate both the incidence and the severity of extreme events given that they occur. using the Generalized Pareto Distribution.

Description: At the 2009 SOA Annual Meeting in Boston, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shared some thoughts on Black Swans, operating in the fourth quadrant, and living in the world of Extremistan versus Mediocristan during his keynote speech, all of which can be found in his published work. The follow-up session, summarized in this article, addresses the real question: What do we actuaries do about these phenomena?

Description: The author reviews the book, The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher. He provides his own interpretation of the power of the swarm and touts the book as a straightforward and informative introduction to various aspects of complexity science.