Description: The Product Development Section, the Financial Reporting Section, the Modeling Section and the Committee on Life Insurance Research are pleased to present new research on modeling and forecasting cause-of-death mortality. Authored by a Milliman team led by Alexandre Boumezoued, the report develops a framework for forecasting cause specific death rates. Included also is a Cause of Deaths Forecasting Tool and a user guide for the tool.

Description: Life insurance industry use experience studies to manage and monitor their blocks of business. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the data cleansing and validation role specific to the life insurance experience study process.

Description: Authored by a MIB Solutions team of Tom Rhodes, Stuart Klugman, Marianne Purushotham and Stacy Gill, the report summarizes the results of a study on the application and adoption of credibility theory within the life insurance and annuity industry. In addition to the report, numerical examples related to the application of credibility to company mortality and lapse data are provided in the four Excel files. This excel spreadsheet is a numerical example relating to the application of Credibility for mortality. Please see the SOA website research section for the complete report on Credibility Theory Practices.

Description: This report explores estimation of employee stock options exercise behavior and option cost to firms.

Description: This research report educates the actuarial community about the various shades of the flood risk as well as the state of the art in quantitative flood risk modeling.

Description: This report provides insights into statistical methods for imputing race and ethnicity in the context of insurance industry disparities. It discusses various imputation techniques, performance metrics, and the evolution of methods over time. The aim is to address the lack of consistent data collection on race and ethnicity in insurance datasets.

Description: There is value in a framework that allows a smooth transition from a qualitative assessment to a quantitative analysis as entities mature in their understanding of climate risk. In this report, a case study on climate change impact on home prices is used to illustrate a Bayesian network iterative approach to building a model for scenario analysis.

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: Automobile insurers classify the risks that they underwrite in order to subdivide the portfolio into classes of risks with similar profiles. While some insurers may have sufficient historical data, several others may not have significant volume of experience data in order to produce reliable claims predictions to help enhance their risk classification systems. A database containing a pooled experience of several insurers thereby helps to produce a more fair, reliable, and equitable premium structure for all risks concerned. This paper uses multilevel models to analyze the data on claim counts provided by the General Insurance Association of Singapore, an organization consisting of most of the general insurers in Singapore. The multilevel nature of the data is due to the following: a certain vehicle is observed over a period of years and is insured by a particular insurance company under a certain 'fleet' policy. The authors show how intercompany data lead to a priori premiums and a posteriori corrections to these initial premiums. Specific focus is made in understanding the intercompany effects using various count distribution models [Poisson, negative binomial, zero–inflated and hurdle Poisson]. The performance of these various models is compared the authors also investigate how to use the historical claims of a company, fleet and/or vehicle in order to correct for the premium initially set.

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.