Description: Book review – this book is a concise look at the evolution of formal investment theory and related financial forecasting, with continual contextual references to its ties to gambling and to organized crime.

Description: The author reviews the book, The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher. He provides his own interpretation of the power of the swarm and touts the book as a straightforward and informative introduction to various aspects of complexity science.

Description: Read the December 2017 issue of Predictive Analytics & Futurism published by the Predictive Analytics & Futurism Section.

Description: The Possible Role of Convolutional Neural Networks in Mortality Risk Protection

Description: September 2009 issue of the Forecasting & Futurism Section newsletter

Description: There is a growing amount of “off-balance sheet” talent in the US and Global workforce. This spans from consultants and contractors, to gig workers and the crowd (both curated crowd and open crowd). One such example is Uber and Lyft workers. Insurance companies and the Actuarial profession have started to experiment with platforms such as Kaggle and this will continue to grow and evolve. This article explores these new sources of talent for companies, the implications to the actuarial function, benefits and challenges of the evolving workforce.

Description: In 2007, members of the Forecasting & Futurism Section were joined by members of the Technology Section and the Marketing & Distribution Sections to conduct a Delphi study about possible developments in the life insurance industry. It was named it “Blue Ocean Strategies in Technology for Business Acquisition by the Life Insurance Industry.” The goal was to have a panel of experts—actuaries and other financial professionals from across the country—identify and debate possible new approaches to acquiring business by life insurers. Panelists were asked to answer questions about possible “Blue Ocean Strategies.” This article highlights the ideas that resulted from those discussions as well as survey results on the same subject.

Description: A significant fraction of insurance risk is characterized by the tail of the claims distribution, where we have much less data to model probabilities accurately. Ignoring the tails can lead to underpricing of tail risk and mispricing. Estimation of the tails can be complex due to a bias-variance tradeoff--the further out we go into the tail the more accurately we can model the extreme tail (lower bias) but the less data we have (increased variance). The statistical tools of Extreme Value Theory can be leveraged to more accurately estimate both the incidence and the severity of extreme events given that they occur. using the Generalized Pareto Distribution.

Description: The artcle looks at the most important features necessary to conduct a meaningful quantitative analysis. The article also discusses how predictive analytics should be used as a tactic to anwer question and not an end in of itself.

Description: The Delphi method was applied to several questions regarding trends in product development. The audience participated in the Delphi survey to predict how economic and demographic factors will impact pricing over the next 7 years.