Description: The Product Development Section, the Financial Reporting Section, the Modeling Section and the Committee on Life Insurance Research are pleased to present new research on modeling and forecasting cause-of-death mortality. Authored by a Milliman team led by Alexandre Boumezoued, the report develops a framework for forecasting cause specific death rates. Included also is a Cause of Deaths Forecasting Tool and a user guide for the tool.

Description: Summary of the SOA's research report Modern Deterministic Scenarios for Interest Rates, which developed interest rate scenarios for use in cash flow testing.

Description: Identifying and submitting all appropriate ICD-9 diagnosis codes to CMS will result in a higher risk score for the member and increased payments to Medicare Advantage plans. Milliman's HCC prevalence study illustrates the significant variations in HCC prevalence rates by age/gender, geography, and population type and will assist plans in benchmarking the effectiveness of their own diagnosis code capture efforts.

Description: This is the abstract of a paper that complements the existing research on optimal reinsurance by proposing another model for the determination of the optimal reinsurance design.

Description: Many insurers preparing market consistent financial statements encounter the issue of developing volatility assumptions for equity options and guarantees that are longer than any observable market data. This presentation develops a generalization of the classical Black Scholes option pricing model that is consistent with the European CRO Forum's framework for valuing non-hedgeable risk. The presentation argues that, with reasonable parameter choices, the model fits observed volatility surfaces well enough that it can be used to estimate implied volatilities where no market data exists.

Description: This paper addresses the fuzziness in regression models. The goal is to present a test procedure to explicitly examine whether an independent variable has a clear functional relationship with the dependent variable in a specific regression model, or whether their relationship is fuzzy. To this end, the authors interpret the spread of the regression coefficients as a statistic measuring the fuzziness of the relationship between the corresponding independent variable and the dependent variable. They then derive test distributions based on the null hypothesis that such spreads could have been obtained with data generated by a classical regression model with random errors. The analysis is presented in conceptual rather than technical terms.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that introduces spatio-temporal models and methods for analysis with specific emphasis on quantities of interest in actuarial science. Generalized additive mixed models are used for the analysis of geographic and temporal variability of mortality rates.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that studies Gerber-Shiu functions and dividend payments in an insurance risk model driven by a spectrally negative Levy process of bounded variation.

Description: The theme of this paper relates to solving portfolio selection problems using linear programming. The authors extend the linear optimization framework for Conditional Value-at-Risk-based portfolio selection problems to optimization over a more general class of risk measure known as the class of Coherent Distortion Risk Measure. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2012 Vol. 1.

Description: This article includes a description of robotic process automation as it relates to actuarial departments. Robotic process automation is becoming more prevalent in actuarial departments as different regulatory changes cause the processes to be more complex. As robotic process automation takes over more jobs, actuaries will have to enhance and evolve their skillsets to better complement the new tools. This article provides an introduction for actuaries to inform them what they should expect, and how they can adapt to these changes.