Description: Announcement of an upcoming 2003 Stochastic Modeling Symposium.

Description: This article, with some humor, describes a movement known as “econophysics” of physicists modeling economic systems, including capital markets, using techniques and concepts developed in studying the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of complex systems. A version of this article appeared in The Actuary UK in August 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Description: This article is the first in a series of articles on insurance applicant mortality risk analytics. From Small Talk Newsletter, Issue 37, January 2012.

Description: In this article, we talk to Lei Rao-Knight, FSA, Vice President and Actuary at Prudential Financial. Lei discusses her model development experience in the Modeling Center of Excellence.

Description: In December 1997, the Society of Actuaries held a conference whose focus was actuarial and financial modeling. During the course of that conference, one of the speakers mentioned a number of technologies his firm was using for modeling, which were either unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar to some of the audience. The purpose of this paper is to define each of the technologies mentioned during that presentation and to briefly describe their distinguishing characteristics. The technologies discussed in this paper are statistical pattern recognition [SPR], neural networks [NNs], genetic algorithms [GAs], simulated annealing, fractal analysis, chaos theory, rule induction, data fusion algorithms [DFAs], data compression, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning, and expert systems.

Description: The Individual Life Experience Committee is holding a competition encouraging actuaries and other interested parties to predict 2017 industry mortality based on a data set containg 2009 - 2016 data. The competition is not only about predicting mortality, but also about explaining and presenting the results.

Description: Overview of the session “Analytics You Should Know, but Don’t” which took place at the 2007 SOA Annual Meeting in which R, an open source language for statistical computing, was discussed.

Description: This report covers the latest emerging trends in U.S. population mortality. The SOA relied upon data furnished by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Observations are based on the CDC’s recent release of 2021 mortality experience, along with prior mortality experience data from 1999 through 2020.

Description: This report provides a methodology for identifying climate regime shifts in different scenarios to prepare insurers for the impacts of climate change. It discusses physical tipping points, socio-economic tipping points, and regime shifts affecting the insurance industry, with a focus on wildfires in California and heat stress in the Pacific Northwest.

Description: This report gives an update on the Getzen Model of Long-Run Medical Cost Trends for 2025-2035+, providing insights on key considerations, input parameters, and projections. It includes observations on long-term medical cost trends, budgetary resistance, and regulatory impacts on healthcare expenditures.