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: The PA Symposium will be an immersive experience benefiting entry level actuaries through senior managers, and PA newbies through advanced practitioners.

Description: Machine learning models are not black-boxes; these models can easily be interpreted using tools like SHAP, LIME and Anchor. These tools can facilitate the understanding of the model and the business problem. We can used these tools to build better models and communicate how predictions are generated. This article demonstrates their use in a mortality model.

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: 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: This article compares three potential approaches to determining new coefficients for health-based risk scoring models: full recalibration, p-value credibility weighting, and penalized ridge regression.

Description: A description of actuaries who also make art.

Description: A list of accomplishments from 2016 for the Predictive Analytics & Futurism section.

Description: Collaborative filtering models drive recommendations provided by Netflix and Amazon. This article uses the same models to explore patients’ medical conditions.

Description: Issue Introduction and editorial on how PAF tools and techniques can ease the angst of competing in the financial risk arena.