Description: Introduction to the topics of the issue; and anecdote regarding the value classical versus newer techniques.

Description: Futurism section members participated in this Delphi study, which had multiple choice questions on a range of life, health, economic and professional issues. The article provides background on the study and comments on the predictions of participants for 2010 (and 2050) in light of experience to date.

Description: The author, Mary Pat Campbell, participated in the 4th season of the Good Judgment Project, a prediction tournament. She explains the basic metric used for evaluating predictions in the contest and some of the lessons learned from her participation.

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.

Description: Summary of the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

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: Read the December 2017 issue of Predictive Analytics & Futurism published by the Predictive Analytics & Futurism Section.

Description: Discussion about the need for, and approach to, measuring organizational expertise ton ensure the learning investment is resulting in expertise growth.

Description: A concise overview of Generative Adversarial Networks.

Description: History of Big Data, and approaches to cope with it. The author suggests that actuaries have been using similar methods for a long time; but need to get up to speed on the newer terms and variations.