Description: Feature article about the use of approximations.

Description: Summary of the SOA research project on PBR Simplified Methods. Describes the multi-risk scenario generator, central estimate assumptions, assumption objectivity measures, and regulatory demonstrations per VM-20.

Description: Recognizing an opportunity to help serve its members in this age of increased financial oversight, the Health Section of the Society of Actuaries commissioned a series of guides on the use of statistical techniques specifically geared for the work of health actuaries. The first guide in the series titled, 'Statistical Methods for Health Actuaries - IBNR Estimates: An Introduction,' is about the calculation of incurred but not reported [IBNR] health claims reserves. In particular, the guide focuses on the development of confidence intervals around IBNR estimates. This is an Excel workbook created to demonstrate the techniques discussed in the guide.

Description: A discussion of alternative meanings to “Best” in best estimate. When one is trying to estimate a result that is normally distributed, the mean, median and mode will all equal one another. However if the results are not normally distributed, different variance metrics will result in different “best” estimates. When different parts of a financial statement use different criteria for measuring best estimates and different processes for handling variances, the results can be volatile, unpredictable and perhaps unreasonable.

Description: European insurance regulation pretends to capture and rely on the 1-year 1-in-200 VaR. But there cannot exist any scientific calibration of such measure. Why?

Description: This abstract describes a paper that develops a method to estimate the two parameters of the discrete stable distribution.

Description: This paper presents a random selection method with the Monte Carlo simulation technique in the estimation of loss reserves. The future loss development factors are randomly selected from a weighted empirical distribution of observed loss development factors. This nonparametric approach provides an estimate of the distribution of total loss reserve.

Description: This is a presentation From 38th Annual Actuarial Research Conference 8/9/2003, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Pricing health insurance presents numerous statistical problems. This paper develops a non-parametric method for handling these problems. This method involves kernel density estimation of the charge level distribution and also kernel smoothing between the reimbursement function derivatives. It derives some properties of the estimates so obtained. It illustrates the method with some dental data and compares the results to some other simpler estimation techniques.

Description: Recognizing an opportunity to help serve its members in this age of increased financial oversight, the Health Section of the Society of Actuaries commissioned a series of guides on the use of statistical techniques specifically geared for the work of health actuaries. In this first guide in the series, the topic is an estimate well-known to health actuaries- the calculation of incurred but not reported [IBNR] health claims reserves. In particular, this guide focuses on the development of confidence intervals around IBNR estimates.