Description: Provides details of the 2nd forecasting competition for the best model that predicts the Civilian Unemployment Rate 'UNRATE', measured on a monthly basis, from March-end 2012 through September-end 2012.

Description: This article is about research studies that use the Delphi technique. It describes what a Delphi study is and gives a thumbnail sketch of two Delphi studies the Society of Actuaries has sponsored in the past 10 years, as well as a recently initiated Delphi study.

Description: Fuzzy logic is form of multi-valued logic that allows the creation of fuzzy rules. This article introduces the "sets" package for the R programming language for fuzzy logic.

Description: Unstructured data is often synonymous with Big Data; and the term is used and misused a lot. Richard Xu and his colleague, Dihui Lai, dispel some of the confusion about Big Data in their article “Big Data In Life Insurance—Does It Exist? If So, How Should We Handle It?” They address some of the ways to deal with the mounting challenges of capacity and speed as data scales up rapidly in size. Hadoop was once just the name of a toy elephant; but there is nothing toy-like about how it has been employed to handle very large datasets. Five exabytes supposedly represents all the words ever spoken by human beings; but according to IBM, the new SKA telescope initiative will generate over an exabyte of data every day.1 How will we cope with big data? Read Richard and Dihui’s article for some hints.

Description: Here we break down deep learning into its various conceptual sets so as to have a better intuitive understanding of deep learning.

Description: A description of how to use Deep Learning and TensorFlow

Description: This article takes the reader on a speculative trip to the not too distant future to explore a hypothetical new life insurance company that has completely reinvented the way it does business, and explores some of the potential benefits to consumers and the company’s stakeholders.

Description: We actuaries are aware that soft skills are important but somehow, they appear distant and difficult to sustain.

Description: In this article, we are going to discuss the AR model by making connections to time-dependent ordinary differential equations.

Description: Summary of what the section has accomplished over the past year.