Description: Fuzzy logic is form of multi-valued logic that allows the creation of fuzzy rules. This article introduces the "sets" package for the R programming language for fuzzy logic.

Description: Summary of the issue, with emphasis on common sense and accuracy rather than blind precision. Also describes two F&F contests.

Description: A Delphi Research Study of Long-Term Care Financing Solutions." Two members of the Project Oversight Group discuss the reasons for the study and the Delphi method and summarize the results of the study.

Description: Unstructured data is often synonymous with Big Data; and the term is used and misused a lot. Richard Xu and his colleague, Dihui Lai, dispel some of the confusion about Big Data in their article “Big Data In Life Insurance—Does It Exist? If So, How Should We Handle It?” They address some of the ways to deal with the mounting challenges of capacity and speed as data scales up rapidly in size. Hadoop was once just the name of a toy elephant; but there is nothing toy-like about how it has been employed to handle very large datasets. Five exabytes supposedly represents all the words ever spoken by human beings; but according to IBM, the new SKA telescope initiative will generate over an exabyte of data every day.1 How will we cope with big data? Read Richard and Dihui’s article for some hints.

Description: This article describes a method that can be useful when re-fitting a risk score model to a population of only moderate size. Learn how to use concepts like ridge regression to train a model with partial credibility.

Description: An overview of the Predictive Analytics World (PAW) conference

Description: The editor of the newsletter provides a running list of articles included in the issue highlighting such topics as the applicability genetic algorithms, the power of group dynamics, judgmental forecasting, improvement in mortality and complexity science.

Description: Provides details of the 2nd forecasting competition for the best model that predicts the Civilian Unemployment Rate 'UNRATE', measured on a monthly basis, from March-end 2012 through September-end 2012.

Description: This article is about research studies that use the Delphi technique. It describes what a Delphi study is and gives a thumbnail sketch of two Delphi studies the Society of Actuaries has sponsored in the past 10 years, as well as a recently initiated Delphi study.

Description: A review of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization courses with special emphasis on how they may be useful to actuaries.