Description: A description of the Technology Section's goals and accomplishments.

Description: The author recounts his experience as a keynote speaker at the Actuarial Research Conference and provides advice to young actuaries to present complex subjects in an understandable manner.

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

Description: October 2015 issue of CompAct, the technology section's member benefit newsletter.

Description: Recurrence relations arise naturally in life contingencies for 2 reasons - the aggregate law of mortality, which relates the distribution of the future life times of 2 insureds, if one of them and the other is that most life insurance products can be constructed as a portfolio of 2 basic product types. We use the above simple idea and the extra freedom provided by the fractional age distribution to reveal a structure behind some common recursions. The structure has obvious pedagogical value. More interestingly, a software based on it has been implemented which facilitates actuarial computing.

Description: This paper presents an approach to analyzing continuing care retirement community [CCRC] data, and demonstrates the methods using data from a large CCRC. It is assumed that residents make transitions among a number of states that represent the levels of care required by residents. There is randomness associated with both the transition times and the states entered at these times. The model is conveniently characterized in terms of transition intensity functions, which represent the instantaneous rates of transition between pairs of states.

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: The study of Employee Benefits has always been aided by using financial algorithms. During recent semesters, the Lotus 1-2-3 package Lotus has been introduced to students due to the explosion of its use in the business community. This paper will show how our students use Lotus to design a spreadsheet for computing minimum annual distributions from tax-sheltered plans.

Description: By disinformation we mean the inclusion of data that should not be considered in a study. In this paper we discuss a case in which the presence of disinformation was clear, but it was not possible to determine with certainly which records were extraneous.

Description: The article focuses on the use of predictive analytics in the development of experience studies, pros and cons of using predictive analytics versus traditional techniques, and the implications for setting assumptions and improving profitability.