Description: Read the April 2017 issue of The Modeling Platform published by the Modeling Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: November 2018 issue of The Modeling Platform by the Modeling Section. Practical information for actuaries, trends that impact section, section activities.

Description: In this, the second step, Sibson engaged the vendor and actuarial communities to solicit input on the actuarial model for determining the impact of various environmental, lifestyle and behavioral risk factors. The goal was to understand the extent to which actuaries currently use models around wellness, refine the above conceptual model, and better understand the potential uses of, and value to, the actuarial and vendor communities that would use such a model. We sought to understand the potential applications and sources of data for the actuarial model. We gathered input on how the model would best suit the professional needs and help shape the future role of the actuary. Lastly, we gathered feedback on the above conceptual model.

Description: Report on the EuSpRIG Annual Meeting last July in Paris, which focused on modeling.

Description: Summary of methods and standards to use to achieve an efficient, maintainable model

Description: Producing a crystal-clear balance roll-forward on time, obtaining a fresh model output the first time or providing model results for your business partners with a tight turnaround all depend on one thing: how fast the model engine runs. Authors explored various reasons behind significant computational power consumption, and discussed different ways to speed the computational process such as in-force population compression, model use case consolidation, code simplification and streamlining, and infrastructure automation, etc.

Description: Spark offers a way to get some dramatic speed and scalability advantages over the Map-reduce methodology whenever you are doing iterative data processing and particularly when you want interactive data analysis capability. Find out why “lazy execution” can be a desirable characteristic when dealing with big data.

Description: This article is the first installment of a three-part series and is focused on providing an overview of LTC modeling approaches and considerations.

Description: "Visual storytelling is frequently used to effectively convey complex actuarial concepts to our clients and other audiences. When talking about data visualization, we often focus on the explanatory aspect. But data visualization is also a crucial tool in developing insights from large and complex data sets at every stage of data analytics spectrum: • descriptive (what happened?), • diagnostic (why it happened?), • predictive (what will happen?), • and prescriptive (how do I influence what will happen?). In exploratory and modeling stages of data analytics’ project, we let the data tell the story or explore our intuition and hypothesis through data pictures. We demonstrate the power of visual display in healthcare data analytics through vivid examples from the healthcare case studies. These illustrations of data visualization exploratory power range from assessing the quality of data or examining outliers, to exploring variables’ relationships and trends, to hypothesis testing, to guiding in feature selection and models’ comparison and evaluation, to model validation. Throughout these illustrations, we will discuss principles of graphical effectiveness, excellence and integrity."

Description: As of 2019, most companies have defined a model steward role. However, this role is defined differently across the industry and the people in this role face a variety of challenges. The expert panel will share background, war stories and best practices from their years of experience in the role.