Description: David Januszewski looks at the the development of open source software in statistics. By comparing the virtues between SAS, the proprietary software and R, the open source software used by statisticians, he thinks that open source software "can and does coexist with the proprietary software" and "both have a purpose. "He further looks at the availability of the open source software in the actuarial profession and does not see "open source software sweeping across actuarial science like it has with other fields". Dave explains the possible uses and virtues of the open source software to actuaries and asserts that it may be beneficial that the open source is used together with the propriety software.

Description: This web page contains links to the following articles of interest to actuaries: 1. A July 9, 2011 New York Times editorial about recent studies suggesting that antidepressants aren’t effective after all, and 2. A March 10, 2011 Time Magazine article by Joel Stein titled, 'Data Mining: How Companies Now Know Everything About You.'

Description: The purpose of this paper was to describe some of the actuarial aspects of one company's electronic system and to discuss the underlying analyses and comparison of alternatives that led to the selection of particular electronic procedures to solve certain actuarial problems. Followed by several discussion papers submitted

Description: Explores the open vs. closed systems debate with regards to actuarial modeling and exposes the over-simplification. Valuable for anyone who uses models.

Description: This article contains a brief synopsis and review of a book called APL The Language and Its Actuarial Applications which is an introduction to APL. Article from The Actuary, Volume 24, Issue 2

Description: Insurance regulations are undergoing a paradigm shift in determining capital and reserves. With Solvency II in Europe and principle-based reserving in the United States, the old formula-based static approach is being replaced or supplemented by a principle-based dynamic method. This change requires enhanced modeling, stochastic simulation and sensitivity analysis, which pose challenges to insurers whose infrastructure has not been built for big computation. This paper introduces a method of building complicated models with small reusable modules and running them on a many-task computing platform to achieve high performance with simplicity. The paper presents an example of a term life insurance model built to take advantage of computer hardware for parallel computing at the task level.

Description: A review of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization courses with special emphasis on how they may be useful to actuaries.

Description: A summary of a survey the Society of Actuaries recently conducted of health payer and provider executives to glean insights into predictive analytics trends.

Description: An exploration of moving predictive modeling capabilities in R to real time operations.

Description: Health Watch, Issue 79, December 2015, Health Watch