Uncategorized

Presidential Polling: Effect of Conventions

With the Democrat and Republican conventions finishing, we can expect to see the state of the presidential race to start stabilizing.  Clinton’s probability of a win dropped precipitously following the FBI disclosures and continued dropping through the Republican convention.  There has been no significant polling post convention so the results still reflect the pre-Democrat convention position. …

Presidential Polling: Effect of Conventions Read More »

Predictive Analytics Presentation on ERM to the Actuarial Society of New York

Howard Zail from Elucidor and Nefissa Sator from Forsides Actuary recently delivered a joint presentation to the Actuarial Society of New York on  “Solvency II and Predictive Analytics in LTC and Beyond:  How U.S. companies can improve Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) by using Advanced techniques developed for Solvency II and emerging predictive analytics methods”.  The presentation was …

Predictive Analytics Presentation on ERM to the Actuarial Society of New York Read More »

Data Science Articles

Here are some recent articles about data science that are worth reading: On Data Science education: Data Science should not be taught in business schools White House To Universities: We Need More Data Scientists Around the industry: IBM to open up Watson to third party developers Research Methods: How Science goes Wrong

Bayesian Analytics and the Presidential Election

Something interesting happened in the lead up to the presidential election.  Most of the mainstream media outlets were predicting a statistical dead heat between Obama and Romney, and only towards the end did some in the media start reporting that Obama had a razor thin margin. However, this so-called statistical tie was at odds with …

Bayesian Analytics and the Presidential Election Read More »

Calstrs Reduces Assumed Rate of Return

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (Calstrs), the second largest public pension fund in the US, reduced its assumed rate of return from 7.75% to 7.5%.  Calstrs is a $145 billion fund. According to Bloomberg, only 3 of the 11 U.S. pension funds with assets of more than $50 billion have reduced their assumptions since 2007-08.