Description: Techniques that have gained some traction in general (property/casualty) insurance will be highlighted with a particular focus on the linear mixed model. This model adds random effects to the more commonly seen fixed effects (for example, as used in GLMs).

Description: The Johns Hopkins ACG Team's comments regarding their participation in the Comparative Analysis of Claims-Based Tools for Health Risk Assessment.

Description: This article compares three potential approaches to determining new coefficients for health-based risk scoring models: full recalibration, p-value credibility weighting, and penalized ridge regression.

Description: First article in a series that walks through the progression from developing LTC assumptions using traditional methods to doing so using predictive analytics.

Description: In this paper, we illustrate how to value American-style options using the Least-Squares Monte Carlo LSM approach proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz 2001 and investigate whether there exists an optimal regression complexity in the LSM framework for options pricing. In particular, we use the smoothing spline in the regression step, which allows us to control the regression complexity on a continuous scale with just one tuning parameter. Numerical results on American put options indicate that we need to use more than a linear regression, but as the regression becomes more complex, the accuracy of the LSM method quickly deteriorates. From 39th Actuarial Research Conference.

Description: Python is the leading programming language for data science. Python programming is one skill that actuaries should acquire. It facilitates analytic work, and the available visualization tools help to communicate ideas. In this article, I use a traditional actuarial problem, mortality modeling, as an example.

Description: Nonparametric regression tries to ?nd a relationship between the predictor and the response without assuming shape of estimated regression function. Its theory and methods are well developed for the case of completely observed vectors of predictors and responses. In many applications, including actuarial, some components of the observed vectors may be missed. Ignoring missing data and using known methods of nonparametric regression may yield inconsistent estimation. Theoretical results on optimal nonparametric regression with missing data are presented, and an applied actuarial example is discussed.

Description: Third article in a series on how to use predictive analytics to improve the development of long-term care projection assumptions.

Description: An approach to quantify medical intervention savings when medical claims data is not available by leveraging overlapping measurement techniques.