Description: The conventional way to analyze grouped observations on a single variable is to construct histograms or, sometimes, fit a normal distribution. We extend this latter approach by allowing for transformations to near normality.

Description: An insurance company starts with an initial surplus, collects premium, pays claims to policyholders and pays dividends to stockholders. What remains is the following year’s surplus. The process continues. This paper describes how to calculate the distribution of surplus for any given year. With these distributions, one can make the calculations of premiums and dividends.

Description: There are two main techniques for evaluating the financial impact of interest rate movements on insurance companies: duration measures and computer simulations. In many ways these approaches provide complementary viewpoints.

Description: Are Your Scenarios on Target?From Risks and Rewards Newsletter, August 2005, Issue No. 47. Actuaries are faced with the dilemma of how to incorporate advances in insurance products and modeling technology into their work. Increasingly, this means looking at a large number of potential outcomes using stochastic simulations.

Description: The comments of DxCG about their participation in the SOA study A Comparative Analysis of Claims-Based Tools for Health Risk Assessment.

Description: Given the lower incidence rate, use of decision tree techniques like Classification and Regression Tree CART in understanding credit or operational risk becomes quite challenging. A commonly adopted solution is biased sampling approach, where more weights are attached to bad customers to artificially hike the incidence or bad rate. While adopting this type of biased sampling approach, question of the best weight arises. This paper adopts an iterative approach in identifying the best weight. The best weight for bankruptcy BKO profiling problem in hand occurred when the incidence rate was around 50 percent where entropy reaches its maximum.

Description: The author recommends the use of "minimally destructive scenarios" as part of an ORSA process, in order to deal with cognitive bias that can occur in risk decision-making. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: This study note focuses on actuarial applications and loss distributions for insurance products.

Description: Report on the topics and speakers at the Actuarial Research Conference and Social Security Benefits, held August 31 through September 2, 1978.

Description: “It’s interesting to note that, given the past year’s reversal of fortunes in the stock markets, all the media rap about heated inquiries around back-dating options has stopped.”