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

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: The U.S. health care industry has gone through a dramatic change during the past several years. The business model has moved from a risk selection model to a risk management model. People can shop online for their health care coverage. Everyone is welcome! Annual and lifetime dollar limits, underwriting and the pre-existing conditions exclusion are all in the history book now. Facing the challenges of the post-reform era, many health insurance carriers began using big data analytics on all aspects of their decision-making processes. The goal is to be able to compete on analytics in this quickly changing environment. However, becoming an analytics competitor is not easy. It requires the belief from the leadership and a group of dedicated analytical professionals to solve emergent business problems that existing strategies cannot address in an evolving market. These problems include marketing for acquisition and retention, coding accuracy, revenue growth, health care disparity, payment integrity, quality of care, health care cost reduction and, ultimately, personalized care management. In this section, audience will learn a basic understanding of the role of predictive analytics in US Healthcare marketplace.

Description: Review of a research project, co-sponsored by the SOA, which examined 83 organizations and over 150 programs that measure the quality and efficiency of hospitals and physicians.

Description: Analysis of the impact of disease progression and treatment on life expectancy provides perspective on the long term costs to the health care system of chronic medical conditions.

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.

Description: Charles Cadman and his team may be new to Kaggle’s data science challenges, but that didn’t stop them from achieving a top-ten finish.

Description: Panel discussion, by a physician and an actuary, about the historical forces behind various trends in organ transplant experience data.

Description: An introduction of predictive modeling techniques that are applicable to insurance industry, including generalized linear model (GLM) and classification and regression tree model(CART). Other models such as data clustering, neural network, and support vector machine (SVM), are also briefly discussed.