Description: A study of disability experience examines cost burden and degree of disability, and how these measures vary across different subpopulations. This article summarizes a presentation given at the Society of Actuaries’ Living to 100: Survival to Advanced Ages International Symposium held on Jan. 7–9, 2008 in Orlando, Florida. An abstract of the author's paper was presented in the September 2008 issue of Long-Term Care News.

Description: Python is the leading programming language for data science. Python programming is one skill that actuaries should acquire. It facilitates analytic work, and the available visualization tools help to communicate ideas. In this article, I use a traditional actuarial problem, mortality modeling, as an example.

Description: The influenza pandemic of 1918-20 is recognized as having generally taken place in three waves, starting in the northern spring and summer of 1918. This pattern of three waves, however, was not universal: in some locations influenza seems to have persisted into or returned in 1920. The recorded statistics of influenza morbidity and mortality are likely to be a significant understatement. Limitations of these data can include nonregistration, missing records, misdiagnosis, and nonmedical certification, and may also vary greatly between locations. Further research has seen the consistent upward revision of the estimated global mortality of the pandemic, which a 1920s calculation put in the vicinity of 21.5 million. A 1991 paper revised the mortality as being in the range 24.7-39.3 million. This paper suggests that it was of the order of 50 million. However, it must be acknowledged that even this vast figure may be substantially lower than the real toll, perhaps as much as 100 percent understated.

Description: An economic analysis of bariatric surgery and health care costs supports the case for health plans to cover these procedures.

Description: Discussion of the separate and joint effects of obesity and diabetes on disability and mortality, and ways these effects can be used to improved insurance pricing and reserving, reverse the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, and improve current projections of disability and mortality risks.

Description: Analysis of the impact of disease progression and treatment on life expectancy provides perspective on the long term costs to the health care system of chronic medical conditions.

Description: Looks at free and inexpensive resources for the novice in predictive analytics, covering the data analysis theory as well as the most commonly used languages/software used in the field.

Description: This article discusses data mining and the statistics of coincidence, and provides “guidelines for backtesting integrity” to help ensure results have value beyond mere coincidence. Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of the Horizon, a publication of BARRA, Inc., and is reprinted with permission.

Description: Spark offers a way to get some dramatic speed and scalability advantages over the Map-reduce methodology whenever you are doing iterative data processing and particularly when you want interactive data analysis capability. Find out why “lazy execution” can be a desirable characteristic when dealing with big data.

Description: A general introduction about predictive modeling in insurance applications. Some basic models are discussed, such as Generalized Linear Model(GLM), Calssification and Regression Tree Model. Other models are also briefly introduced, including data clustering, neural networks and support vector machine.