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 U.S. health care industry has gone through a dramatic change during the past several years. The business model has moved from a risk selection model to a risk management model. People can shop online for their health care coverage. Everyone is welcome! Annual and lifetime dollar limits, underwriting and the pre-existing conditions exclusion are all in the history book now. Facing the challenges of the post-reform era, many health insurance carriers began using big data analytics on all aspects of their decision-making processes. The goal is to be able to compete on analytics in this quickly changing environment. However, becoming an analytics competitor is not easy. It requires the belief from the leadership and a group of dedicated analytical professionals to solve emergent business problems that existing strategies cannot address in an evolving market. These problems include marketing for acquisition and retention, coding accuracy, revenue growth, health care disparity, payment integrity, quality of care, health care cost reduction and, ultimately, personalized care management. In this section, audience will learn a basic understanding of the role of predictive analytics in US Healthcare marketplace.

Description: While many know that machine learning is a big deal and even have a general idea of what it is, many do not know what machine learning can do for them. As an alternative to citing achievements or explaining algorithms, this article outlines the challenges that occur in statistics and the solutions that machine learning offers. Some of those challenges include correlated predictors, missing data, data interaction, and prediction intervals. Corresponding solutions include regularization technics, missing value imputation with KNN, tree based models, and cluster analysis for backtesting.