Description: The author discusses the various components that may have an effect on the future of mortality such as the extinction of numerous species of flora and fauna the growth of agribusiness genetically modified foods, better public health institutions and programs, etc.

Description: Using the Cox proportional Hazards Model to improve underwriting debits and credits.

Description: Uncertainty of a predictive model is a fact of life that many insurers could be overlooking at their peril without a framework for assessing it. The article provides a framework to understand the prediction uncertainty, which can be critical for the insurance operations using predictive models. Coin toss example explains model uncertainty and randomness inherent in making predictions to the number of heads expected. A mortality analysis case study illustrates how the Bayesian methodology can be used to develop the prediction uncertainty. In particular, the article shows that the Bayesian framework is a way to combine historical data and actuarial judgment, and directly address the model uncertainty through its posterior distribution.

Description: Actuaries can empower their understanding of policyholder behavior with third party data. Modeling policyholder behavior should start from developing knowledge of who they are, instead of actuaries assuming what a rational behavior should be.

Description: An application of GLM trees to mortality modeling using the Individual Life Experience Committee 2009-2015 dataset. GLM trees are a hybrid of GLMs and decision trees which are analogous to the way actuaries have analyzed data. The major benefits include speeding up actuarial analytic workflows, improving data understanding, and improving data visualization.

Description: Matrix decomposition techniques are used to find main features of a dataset. These features can be used to describe the data or to find clusters of objects. The decompositions have problems when the matrices have missing data or are from different exposures. This article examines the issue and some papers dealing with it.