Description: Read the December 2016 issue of The Modeling Platform published by the Modeling Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: From the 1985 Valuation Actuary Symposium Discussion of the practical application of cash flow testing in the valuation process.

Description: Regime switching models have become a popular tool in econometric time series modeling since their introduction in Hamilton [1989].These models have been widely applied for equity-returns for investment guarantees. A prominent risk management challenge is hedging these guarantees, given the equity regime switching process. This presentation develops some methodologies for regime-switching portfolio replication and use real world data to demonstrate and evaluate their effects. A Bayesian approach for regime switching model fitting is used, which allows for the examination of the robustness of each of the optimization methods when parameter uncertainty is present.

Description: This is an Excel workbook that can be used as a tool for health insurance companies to model their potential risk exposure from an influenza pandemic. It is based on a model developed for a Society of Actuaries study examining the potential implications of a pandemic on the U.S. health insurance industry. The spreadsheet is saved with many of the same assumptions used in this research and reproduces the results of the exhibits contained in the June 2010 report, 'Potential Impact of Pandemic Influenza on the U.S. Health Insurance Industry.'

Description: In December 1997, the Society of Actuaries held a conference whose focus was actuarial and financial modeling. During the course of that conference, one of the speakers mentioned a number of technologies his firm was using for modeling, which were either unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar to some of the audience. The purpose of this paper is to define each of the technologies mentioned during that presentation and to briefly describe their distinguishing characteristics. The technologies discussed in this paper are statistical pattern recognition [SPR], neural networks [NNs], genetic algorithms [GAs], simulated annealing, fractal analysis, chaos theory, rule induction, data fusion algorithms [DFAs], data compression, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning, and expert systems.

Description: It is well-known that reinsurance can be an effective risk management technique for an insurer. An appropriate use of reinsurance reduces the adverse risk exposure of an insurer and improves the overall viability of the underlying business. The use of reinsurance, on the other hand, incurs additional cost to the insurer in the form of reinsurance premium. This implies that an insurer is faced with a classic tradeoff between risk spreading and risk retaining. The thrust of my research is to propose some reinsurance designs that are optimal from the perspective of an insurer. This presentation describes an empirical approach to optimal reinsurance designs. This new method has the advantage that it does not need to make any explicit assumptions on the distribution of the underling risk. More importantly, it provides a simple and yet practical way of obtaining solution on a wide range of optimal reinsurance models.

Description: This paper uses a mortality surge model to estimate the total financial impact on the U.S. insurance industry of a flu pandemic. It does not attempt to determine the probability of such a pandemic.