Description: In December 1997, the Society of Actuaries held a conference whose focus was actuarial and financial modeling. During the course of that conference, one of the speakers mentioned a number of technologies his firm was using for modeling, which were either unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar to some of the audience. The purpose of this paper is to define each of the technologies mentioned during that presentation and to briefly describe their distinguishing characteristics. The technologies discussed in this paper are statistical pattern recognition [SPR], neural networks [NNs], genetic algorithms [GAs], simulated annealing, fractal analysis, chaos theory, rule induction, data fusion algorithms [DFAs], data compression, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning, and expert systems.

Description: A study of the effect of random interest rates on life insurance programs and on annuities both certain and non-certain. This is done under several assumptions on the stochastic structure of the interest rates.

Description: This paper uses contingent claims analysis to evaluate portfolios of vulnerable private loan guarantees and investigate their risk diversification properties.