Description: Slides from a panel discussion session at the Spring meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Antonio, Texas, June 14-15, 2004 Discussion of the basics of actuarial appraisals: Panelists discussed the reasons to perform an actuarial appraisal, the processes involved, issues that should be addressed and assumption development.

Description: This presentation develops an integrated approach that addresses simultaneously guaranteed annuity option (GAO)’s pricing and capital requirement calculation.

Description: Regime switching models have become a popular tool in econometric time series modeling since their introduction in Hamilton [1989].These models have been widely applied for equity-returns for investment guarantees. A prominent risk management challenge is hedging these guarantees, given the equity regime switching process. This presentation develops some methodologies for regime-switching portfolio replication and use real world data to demonstrate and evaluate their effects. A Bayesian approach for regime switching model fitting is used, which allows for the examination of the robustness of each of the optimization methods when parameter uncertainty is present.

Description: Ever wanted to do a Kaggle data science competition, but didn't know where to start? This presentation meets the needs of actuaries interested in predictive analytics and competitive data science. The presentation will describe the nature of competitive data science, and provide insights into lessons learned by competing in the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge at Kaggle, as well as other Kaggle competitions. The presenters will provide an introduction to neural networks and describe the nature of the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge and other Kaggle competitions, plus a solution approaches that can be used to obtain top scores using Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs), random forests and boosted trees.

Description: It is well-known that reinsurance can be an effective risk management technique for an insurer. An appropriate use of reinsurance reduces the adverse risk exposure of an insurer and improves the overall viability of the underlying business. The use of reinsurance, on the other hand, incurs additional cost to the insurer in the form of reinsurance premium. This implies that an insurer is faced with a classic tradeoff between risk spreading and risk retaining. The thrust of my research is to propose some reinsurance designs that are optimal from the perspective of an insurer. This presentation describes an empirical approach to optimal reinsurance designs. This new method has the advantage that it does not need to make any explicit assumptions on the distribution of the underling risk. More importantly, it provides a simple and yet practical way of obtaining solution on a wide range of optimal reinsurance models.

Description: This discussion at an SOA 1968 Regional Meeting is about corporate planning and the actuary's role in the process.

Description: In this discussion, the panel recalls all of the considerations in the design of the SOFASIM Society OF Actuaries SIMulator. It was obvious from the first model of the life insurance company SOFASIM, as it was named must have an actuarial side as well as an investment side. GAAP and tax aspects of the model are also discussed.

Description: This session from the 1993 Valuation Actuary Symposium focuses on general modeling issues associated with the completion of the opinion and memorandum required by revisions to the Standard Valuation Law. It concentrates on liability modeling.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium Proceedings, Session 11, discusses health financial projections and projection modeling in general.

Description: From a session at the 2000 Valuation Actuary Symposium held in Washington DC, September 14-15, 2000 In this session the panelists discussed the issues related to the actuarial aspects associated with the demutualization process. The issues discussed included: • Developing historical and prospective assumptions • Aligning the models used in the company’s philosophy regarding dividend determination and pricing • Creating experience assumptions when less-than-perfect data exist • Determining who gets what • Complying with actuarial and accounting standards