Description: Discussion of several short stories by featured author Steve Mathys. Mathys was the winner of the 10th Speculative Fiction Contest Forecasting and Futurism Section prize.

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

Description: This paper describes techniques that can be used to access any specific piece of information in Wikipedia, such as medical information.

Description: A discussion on how the look of charts and graphs can affect comprehension of data.

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: Feature article discussing the difficult situation of actuarial forecasting with little or no date.

Description: This article describes how different types of regression models used for fund modeling can affect the variable annuity's risk exposure report and attribution report.

Description: Up until recent past, the artificial intelligence portion of data science was looked upon cautiously due to its history of booms and flops . In the latest stream of events, major improvements have taken place in this field and now deep learning, the new leading front for Artificial Intelligence, presents a promising prospect for overcoming problems of big data.

Description: This article explores a potential alternative to the more typical regression-based specification of risk adjustment models. We demonstrate a proof of concept that a nearest-neighbors approach may hold some promise in certain applications of health-based risk adjustment.

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.