Description: Read the December 2018 issue of Small Talk published by Smaller Insurance Company Section. Practical information on trends that impact sections and activities.

Description: This article discussed the NEAT family of neural network algorithms. NEAT automatically determines the number of hidden neurons, as well as their structure. Additionally HyperNEAT can scale to very large problem domains.

Description: Review of a research project, co-sponsored by the SOA, which examined 83 organizations and over 150 programs that measure the quality and efficiency of hospitals and physicians.

Description: This article delves into a new line of statistical thinking of the author, that may be useful for product development actuaries. The key concept is how product design can produce products that diversify quickly, meaning that the company can be confident of a profitable product line, based on fewer sales than might be true for other designs.

Description: SOA Product Development Section Contest Winning Article. Contest was to provide a creative article on future technology for the life insurance industry.

Description: Summarized description of four books on data visualization and their common themes

Description: Principal component analysis is an unsupervised linear transformation mainly used for dimension reduction. Determine key numerical variables with maximum variances in a dataset, identify the correlation and removal of redundant variables are the key aspects of this exploratory data analysis.

Description: Overview on current trends in medical practice impacting the LTC insurance business with a focus on dementia, risk stratification, and predictive modeling.

Description: Technological innovations are disrupting traditional business models, improving products, and enhancing the user experience.