Description: Wright State University is a public research university in Dayton, Ohio, with approximately 11,000 students. With the lowest tuition fees in Ohio, the university has an access mission and plays a critical role in the region by offering high-quality, affordable education. I joined Wright State University in fall 2019 as the director of the Actuarial Science program. In spring 2020 we attained the Universities and Colleges with Actuarial Programs (UCAP)-AC designation from the Society of Actuaries (SOA), becoming one of only three universities in southwest Ohio at this recognition tier. In this article, I would like to tell you about the journey our program has taken—its successes and its challenges. The goal is to offer a resource to other universities seeking to upgrade their Actuarial Science programs.

Description: Overview of regularization and least angle regression approaches.

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: This report proposes a methodology to isolate crop yield improvement due to technological change and favorable and unfavorable weather.

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: The advent of machine learning algorithms has taken predictive analytics and risk scoring to a new level. From gradient boosting machines to k-nearest neighbors regression, the use of these techniques has gained significant traction in healthcare - including health systems like the Cleveland Clinic. This session will discuss the use of predictive analytics to go beyond just assessing the risk of a patient, and instead focus on prescribing a specific intervention of care. In practice, the recommendation of a care plan goes beyond just attributing a score to a patient. It provides physicians and care coordinators the most probabilistic options - e.g. referral to social worker, depression screening, weight-loss program - for positively impacting a patient's future healthcare outcome.

Description: The Delphi method is a non-quantitative forecasting approach that is most useful when other forecasting techniques appear to have limited value. The Society of Actuaries (SOA) has had some impressive results from Delphi studies (even quoted in the Wall Street Journal for their uncanny accuracy on long-range predictions). Attend this session to learn about this effective, yet underutilized method of leveraging the wisdom of crowds.

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.