Description: This abstract describes a paper that analyzes the sample size effects on the estimation of the beta.

Description: The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of soft computing applications in actuarial science. Soft computing refers to modes of computing in which precision is traded for tractability, robustness and ease of implementation.

Description: This research provides a literature review on the topic of post-retirement financial strategies from the perspective of an individual who is approaching retirement age. The body of knowledge surveyed is the post-retirement financial strategies literature that is related to the risks of longevity, inflation, and investment. The literature sources are both academic and practitioner-focused. The end product is a documentation of and commentary on the state-of-the-art in the post-retirement financial strategies area. The intended audience is retirement professionals, and others, who need to be well informed about the current state of post-retirement financial strategies, as reported in the literature.

Description: Hybrids of the soft computing SC technologies have been applied to market forecasting and trading rules, and in many cases have demonstrated better performance than competing approaches. The purpose of this research is to investigate a representative group of these applications and to document the manner in which hybrids of the SC technologies were implemented.

Description: A fuzzy random variable [FRV] has been conceptualized as a vague perception of a crisp but unobservable random variable [RV] and also as a random fuzzy set. Since actuaries seem receptive to these notions of FRV, and there are sources of uncertainty that RVs can not accommodate, but FRVs can, one would expect FRVs to be a component of the actuarial arsenal, but generally this is not the case. Assuming that the reason for this is that potential users are not sufficiently familiar with FRV methodology, the purpose of this article is to help alleviate this situation by presenting a FRV primer.

Description: ARCH Editor's Comments - 2016.2

Description: Recent articles addressed the subject of fuzzy regression [FR] and the term structure of interest rates [TSIR]. Their approach relied on possibilistic regression. Although possibilistic regression has been used in many applications, it has a number of limitations, not the least of which is its nebulous relation to the least-squares concept. As an alternative to possibilistic regression, this paper uses fuzzy least square regression to investigate the TSIR.

Description: The purpose of this article is to revise the fuzzy regression portions of earlier studies and to discuss issues related to the Tanaka approach, including a consideration of fuzzy least-squares regression models. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2006.

Description: The Lee and Carter LC method is getting widely adopted for long-run forecasts of age specific mortality rates. That popularity is first due to the model simplicity. Moreover, the LC model has given successful results for various countries e.g. U.S., Chile, G7 countries. However, some difficulties arose when using population data from certain countries such as UK and Australia. In the present paper, the LC model is applied to data from four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The Singular Value Decomposition SVD, the Weighted Least Square WLS and the Maximum Likelihood estimate MLE are used. These approaches give satisfactory results. The appropriate fitting period needs, however, to be well chosen. The properties of the model's parameters are studied using a bootstrap simulation.