By Brian Hartman and Tom Edwalds
The E&R section will be sponsoring three sessions and a breakfast during the Life and Annuity Symposium, May 8–9 in Seattle, and will be co-sponsoring two sessions. In the first sponsored session, "SOA Experience Study Calculations Educational Tool," David Atkinson (DB Atkinson Consulting) and John McGarry (Insight Decision Solutions) will describe the types of exposure and rate calculations used in various types of experience studies for different lines of business. In the second sponsored session, "Simplified Methodologies for Determining Reserves under VM-20," Mark Birdsall (Lewis and Ellis) and Brian Hartman (BYU) will be presenting their work exploring several possible simplifications, approximations, and modeling efficiency techniques allowed under VM-20 for determining statutory reserves for life insurance products. In the third sponsored session, "Incorporating Spatial Correlation and Dependence in Mortality Models," Brian Hartman and Brad Barney (BYU) will discuss many different ways to incorporate spatial correlation in mortality models using county-level data for the United States.
The session co-sponsored by the E&R, Product Development and Reinsurance sections is "Evaluating New Mortality Scoring Tools." In this session, Julie Decker (RGA) and Jean-Marc Fix (Optimum Re) will describe currently available mortality scoring systems based on various predictive modeling algorithms and explain how to evaluate them. In the session, "Predictive Modeling: Getting out of Square One,” co-sponsored by the E&R and Predictive Analytics and Futurism sections, Jean-Marc Fix will walk participants through the analytical process of developing a basic generalized linear model and setting it up in R.
Please join us in Seattle for this excellent continuing education event.
Brian Hartman, ASA, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Actuarial Science at BYU. He can be reached at hartman@stat.byu.edu.
Thomas Edwalds, FSA, ACAS, MAAA, is a clinical professor at Depaul University. He can be reached at tedwalds@gmail.com.