Description: Futurists acknowledge the power that past performance might bring to the future, but they also explicitly recognize the possibility of ‘wild cards’ which might change the picture completely.

Description: This is a gentle introduction to fuzzy logic. It explains the concept and use of linguistic variables, reference ranges, fuzzification, and defuzzification without the usual advanced mathematics that sometimes obscure these ideas.

Description: Simple Rating Systems: Entry-level sports forecasting

Description: The Delphi Method is discussed in detail. The method attempts to filter out the consensus bias that can result from societal forces by employing a technique whereby an anonymous collection of opinions is used, supplemented by feedback loops that can be used to influence outcomes.

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.

Description: This article explores the use of Generalized Additive Models and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines to model nonlinear relationships in a linear response model. These models use supervised methods to determine the optimal shape of the predictors in the model. Users are provided an example use case so that they may get started right away building models to explore complex relationships in new ways.