Description: The well-known examples of predictive modeling “successes” are numerous. Perhaps less widely recognized is the myriad of ways in which a predictive model can fail to perform as expected, often due to misconceptions or misrepresentations on the part of the analyst. This article, which is intended for a general actuarial audience, focuses on three such pitfalls. By understanding these three common pitfalls, readers may guard against them within their own work, teams, and organizations.

Description: Editorial for the December 2019 print edition of Predictive Analytics & Futurism newsletter describing the large number of informational resources available to PAF Section members.

Description: Data science and predictive analytics are rapidly growing fields and the tools are evolving at a formidable pace. The actuary who wants to be most effective will most likely have to learn at least the basics of more than one programming language, such as R, Python, or Julia, depending on the problem at hand. The Jupyter Notebook App allows you to create interactive notebook documents that are relatively language agnostic, so you only need to learn a single integrated development environment. More importantly, Jupyter Notebooks allows you to easily combine input (code), output (including visualizations), and documentation in a single, shareable, document. Learn how to make better use of your time with these very useful notebooks. This demonstration-based talk will also cover JupyterLab, the next generation of notebooks.

Description: Technology has streamlined countless processes in our daily lives, and insurance is no stranger to this transformation. Technology can make insurance simpler and more personal for consumers, and can enable actuaries to better analyze unstructured data, make good decisions, create new products, and find channels to enhance profitability, provided they can tame the flood of information pouring in from across the digital ecosystem.

Description: Overview about the information covered in the Predictive Analytics Certificate and how that is useful for actuaries.

Description: SOA predictive analytics certificate program provides strong theoretical background and practical, hands-on experience that can be applied to decision making

Description: This is a 4-hour predictive analytics competition. It will be developed by the PAF and Modeling section. The competition will use publicly available data and ask participants to predict the outcome. The person with the best prediction will win the competition. The competition can be done on an individual for team basis. We don’t allow more than 4 people on a team.

Description: You’ve built or updated a predictive model. Is it any good? How can you interpret and understand its predictions? How does it compare to alternative models? This session will look at traditional and non-traditional ways of validating predictive models, with examples from case studies.

Description: Data needed to run the Hack-a-Thon that was held at the 2019 PAS.

Description: This addresses the changing role for property-casualty actuaries as companies are looking toward actuaries to play a bigger role in moving the business forward.