Description: Description of the vast variety of predictive analytics topics covered by the Forecasting & Futurism section and introduction to the July 2015 issue of the newsletter.

Description: Neural networks have fallen only to rise again twice. The latest incarnation borrows much from the past but adds elements to support deep learning. This article demonstrates the state of the art in deep neural network programming.

Description: Jeff Sagarin is one of the most well-known figures in the sports analytics world, with his sports ratings appearing in USA Today for over 30 years. Few may know that he started his career in the actuarial world, even passing three exams before his sports ratings took off. This article explores the parallels between the challenges of developing sports rating systems and the challenges that actuaries face every day.

Description: The article gives a brief history of the development of the Delphi method, and describes the use of the Delphi method in studies by the Society of Actuaries over the past 25 years.

Description: This article discusses techniques used to create risk scores to help determine appropriate primary care panel sizes for a provider organization.

Description: Collaborative filtering models drive recommendations provided by Netflix and Amazon. This article uses the same models to explore patients’ medical conditions.

Description: This article describes the use of artificial society modeling to gauge the effect of insurance agent population and effectiveness on individual life insurance sales. This is part of an ongoing effort to extend the use of one type of agent-based modeling beyond health care, but is far from a practical application at this point.

Description: In this continuation of our July 2013 article we explore an algorithm for evaluating Hidden Markov Models in detail. A preferred method in speech recognition technology, Hidden Markov Models are a promising technique when dealing with data you suspect may be driven by a change in a unobservable state. The example in the article is provided in an Excel workbook for the reader to follow along with.

Description: This article is about how insurance companies are deploying insurance technologies.

Description: A look into how machine learning models implement classification and regression at a deeper level. Covers topics such as multi-regression, softmax, and ROC charts.