Description: Python has become the fastest-growing major programming language in the world. It has surged in popularity over the last decade, following the development of its industry-leading capabilities in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and it is now one of the most globally popular and widely used languages. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons for its popularity and explain why many actuaries and insurers have started using Python.

Description: Overview of the session “Analytics You Should Know, but Don’t” which took place at the 2007 SOA Annual Meeting in which R, an open source language for statistical computing, was discussed.

Description: Risk adjustment in government regulated health plans has been around for over two decades. Yet the strategies for promoting risk score accuracy haven't varied much during that time. Most health plans, physician groups, and vendors promote chart reviews and/or in-home assessments as the primary vehicle for collecting data not perceived to be present in the routine claims submission and adjudication stream. We know that most organizations trying to coalesce encounter data from multiple sources often fail to ensure that all relevant data is ultimately submitted to CMS or a state Medicaid agency. Crucial data, often with significant financial value, frequently gets lost in the data pipeline, somewhere between the provider's billing system and the health plan and/or its vendors. Because 837-formatted data is difficult to read, it complicates payers and vendor’s abilities to track encounter data so that every service delivered to patients is credited to the applicable risk adjustment formula. It is incumbent upon successful risk-adjusted entities to be able to track encounter data, identify processes and/or vendors which may be mangling or losing data, in order to ensure that risk scores are sufficiently accurate to be compliant with plan sponsor requirements and to ensure appropriate revenue to the health plan or provider group.

Description: Discussion of a newly released LTC experience study, including description of data and its increased scope compared to the prior report, reporting specifications, and findings.

Description: Feature article describing what author thinks it will take for a life insurance company to be successful in the year 2020.

Description: This is a presentation of recursive APL programs for Steffenson's and Romberg's algorithms. The programs call themselves repeatedly until terminating conditions are reached. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1987 Vol. 1.

Description: Ever wanted to do a Kaggle data science competition, but didn't know where to start? This presentation meets the needs of actuaries interested in predictive analytics and competitive data science. The presentation will describe the nature of competitive data science, and provide insights into lessons learned by competing in the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge at Kaggle, as well as other Kaggle competitions. The presenters will provide an introduction to neural networks and describe the nature of the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge and other Kaggle competitions, plus a solution approaches that can be used to obtain top scores using Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs), random forests and boosted trees.

Description: This article looks at an extensive integrated collection of financial mathematical modeling packages available in R, a language and environment for statistical computing.

Description: The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of soft computing applications in actuarial science. Soft computing refers to modes of computing in which precision is traded for tractability, robustness and ease of implementation.

Description: Actuarial models and modeling processes continue to grow in complexity, accelerated by the changes in U.S. Statutory, U.S. GAAP and IFRS reporting requirements in the past few years. Modeling and valuation teams are expanding their toolkits beyond the traditional vendor-maintained actuarial software and the MS Office suite of tools. Companies have started to use a variety of tools to improve model dev and valuation processes, including: - Data management - Automation and workflow - Reporting and analytics