Statistics for Reserve Variability will introduce students to common probability distributions and statistics as well as the basics of generating random variables for simulation and bootstrapping. A document “Introduction to Statistics for Stochastic Reserving” will be distributed to students before start of the course in addition to data sets used in the illustrations and needed for the exercises and homework. The document will also contain a bibliography of books, papers and tutorials on the topics to be covered in the course.

Please note that this is a two course series and the courses shall be sold separately.

Course 1: Introduction to Statistics and Notation will be coming out in Summer 2015, while Course 2: Introduction to Modeling Statistics will be coming out late 2015.

THE EXPERTS

Louise Francis, FCAS, MAAA, Consulting Principal and Founder, Francis Analytics and Actuarial Data Mining, Inc.

Louise Francis is the Consulting Principal and founder of Francis Analytics and Actuarial Data Mining, Inc. where she leads reserving, pricing, predictive modeling, simulation and related actuarial projects and engagements.

Ms. Francis has introduced insurance professionals to advanced modeling methods, including simulation, predictive modeling and text mining, both as a speaker at conferences and as an author of papers and articles. Five of her papers were awarded the Data Quality/Data Technology prize by the CAS (Casualty Actuarial Society) and IDMA (Insurance Data Management Association). The papers covered specific modeling procedures such as neural networks and MARS (multivariate adaptive regression splines) as well as leading edge data gathering techniques such as text mining. They also illustrated a variety of insurance applications including fraud modeling, reserving and underwriting. She has also won two awards for papers and essays related to the financial crisis. Ms. Francis is a former VP Research for the CAS. She is on the Joint Risk Management council and is chair of the JRMS research committee. Ms. Francis is also the CAS representative and Secretary to the ASTIN committee. Ms. Francis has been involved in a number of other CAS initiatives, including estimating reserve variability, improving data quality, and reviewing papers for the CAS journal Variance. She is an instructor with Mark Shapland of the CAS Limited Attendance Seminar on Reserve Variability and routinely applies the methods she teaches in her practice.

Mark R. Shapland, FCAS, FSA, MAAA, Senior Consulting Actuary, Milliman, Inc.

Mark is a senior consultant with the Dubai office of Milliman and was previously the lead casualty actuary on the PCIS (software development) Team. He joined the firm in 2003, after 24 years of experience at insurance companies and other consulting firms.

Mark’s area of expertise is property and casualty insurance, particularly pricing (personal and commercial lines), reserving (including reserve variability and asbestos liabilities), individual risk and association-type dividend plans and premium rates for large accounts, reinsurance, data management, and dynamic risk modeling. Mark has international experience, having worked in Europe for four years, as well as shorter assignments in many other countries. He has significant management experience as chief actuary for two different insurance companies. He also created and conducted training seminars on reserving and pricing topics for executives worldwide and was a key member of a team that created an executive training program based on computer simulations.