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

Description: This paper describes techniques that can be used to access any specific piece of information in Wikipedia, such as medical information.

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: 3rd Annual iPad contest announcement

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: 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: This article shows how to use a RBF Neural network to predict if a breast tumor is malignant. The network is trained using a genetic algorithm that uses C# multi-threading.

Description: Overview and review of books to teach yourself about deep learning.

Description: This actually is a copy of an appendix of a research paper sponsored by the SOA Committee on Finance Research. You can read the entire research paper: “Lapse Modeling for the Post-Level Period—a Practical Application of Predictive Modeling” at the SOA site https://www.soa.org/Research/Research-Projects/Finance-Investment/lapse-2015-modeling-post-level/#sthash.W9lERSls.dpbs, but you can read this valuable appendix copied here in this issue to see how to build a PM step-by-step using your data and the R programming language. We thank Richard Xu, Dihui Lai, Minyu Cao, Scott Rushing, and Tim Rozar for their excellent paper and the Society of Actuaries, for the permission to reprint this portion of the paper.

Description: The article gives a brief history of the development of the Delphi method, and describes the use of the Delphi method in studies by the Society of Actuaries over the past 25 years.