Description: Discusses how 'insignificant' changes in assumptions can have very significant affects.

Description: View the complete issue of the July 2014, Forecasting and Futurism newsletter.

Description: Big data, predictive analytics, machine learning and AI will likely transform the insurance market and the actuarial profession. The actuarial profession is seeing changes many markets, including health and property and casualty. This article describes these trends and provides an introduction into what companies and the Society of Actuaries (SOA) are doing to adapt and capitalize on these trends.

Description: Reflection on three years on the PAF section council and where we're headed next.

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: An introduction of predictive modeling techniques that are applicable to insurance industry, including generalized linear model (GLM) and classification and regression tree model(CART). Other models such as data clustering, neural network, and support vector machine (SVM), are also briefly discussed.

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: Deep learning is a method that allows neural networks to be constructed with more than just one or two hidden layers. These layers can then be trained independently and simultaneously of each other. This article provides an introduction to deep belief neural networks.