Description: Description of the vast variety of predictive analytics topics covered by the Forecasting & Futurism section and introduction to the July 2015 issue of the newsletter.

Description: An economic analysis of bariatric surgery and health care costs supports the case for health plans to cover these procedures.

Description: A study of disability experience examines cost burden and degree of disability, and how these measures vary across different subpopulations. This article summarizes a presentation given at the Society of Actuaries’ Living to 100: Survival to Advanced Ages International Symposium held on Jan. 7–9, 2008 in Orlando, Florida. An abstract of the author's paper was presented in the September 2008 issue of Long-Term Care News.

Description: Looks at free and inexpensive resources for the novice in predictive analytics, covering the data analysis theory as well as the most commonly used languages/software used in the field.

Description: The authors explain big data and the potential uses of this information, especially as it is beginning to be adopted by the life insurance industry.

Description: A study of disability experience examines cost burden and degree of disability, and how these measures vary across different subpopulations.

Description: This article describes the history and in some respects, the future of Big Data, and the tools we can use to handle it for PM and for machine learning. One such tool is Vowpal Wabbit, which sounds like something from a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoon (“Dwat that wabbit”), but it really is a popular approach to process a dataset of any size, as there is no need to load all the data into memory. Big data is forcing us to enhance many of our tools. So is the increased actuarial usage of stochastic-in-stochastic analyses (nested stochastic processes), which can result in unacceptably long program run times. Many of our popular computer languages are not inherently well suited for parallel computations.

Description: A closer look at family tier factor rating assumptions, and how well they reflect actual claim cost data.

Description: We highlight a new approach leveraging predictive analytics to identify high risk and rising risk opioid users for more effective screening and follow-up care.

Description: Spark offers a way to get some dramatic speed and scalability advantages over the Map-reduce methodology whenever you are doing iterative data processing and particularly when you want interactive data analysis capability. Find out why “lazy execution” can be a desirable characteristic when dealing with big data.