Cross Posts About Forecasting

[admin]

Just to kick-off the forum, here are some posts in other threads that may be of interest to you forecasters:

Six rules for effective forecasting

SAS CEO shares vision on the future of forecasting at World Economic Forum

BOBJ Predictive Analytics


Enjoy! and start posting.

[Eugene Dubossarsky]

Welcome to the IAPA FSIG group.

This is a forum for discussion of Forecasting as applied to real world problems.

The vision for this group is to drive innovation and good practice in forecasting by combining high level business experience, intuition and sound scientific and statistical practice.

Discussions may focus on applications, forecasting techniques, cultural and political issues complicating or arising from forecasting, and means of validating forecasting accuracy.

Methods to be discussed need not be limited to strictly statistical or computational techiques. Indeed, the effective harnessing of human judgement is a key area of interest for some FSIG participants.

Forms of forecasting will include forecasting of regular numerical outcomes, such as air temperatures, stock prices or sales figures, as well as irregular and qualitative event outcomes ("what is the likelihood of my two biggest competitors merging") ?

Regular FSIG events will be announced on this group, and forecasting resource links included.

To get the ball rolling,

I include a link to a though-provoking talk on expert forecasting accuracy by Phillip Tetlock:

http://fora.tv/2007/01/26/Why_Foxes_...Than_Hedgehogs

and another with Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan":

http://fora.tv/2008/02/04/Future_Has...han_We_Thought

[Doug Heywood]

An interesting application of quants is discussed in Steve Bennett's blog.

It's all about Google's use of quantitative analytics to predict staff leaving. I presume they only care about the ones they don't want to leave?

Society Insurance has implemented Valen Technologies' UnderRight predictive analytics solution.

By Nathan Conz, DECEMBER 01, 2009

Society Insurance, a Fond du Lac, Wis.-based commercial insurer, has successfully implemented the UnderRight predictive analytics solution from Valen Technologies (Denver), the vendor announced on Tuesday in a press release.

Society is now in production with UnderRight in its workers' compensation line of business. The carrier expects the solution to positively impact the its combined ratio by enabling improved underwriting decision consistency and efficiency, according to the release.

"Valen's UnderRight solution offers us the ability to price risks more accurately — the fundamental lever we need to continuously improve the growth and profitability of our business," Rick Parks, COO of Society Insurance, said in the release. ""In addition to providing us with much greater pricing power in the marketplace, we are now able to focus our experienced underwriters where they are most acutely needed. " to analyze complex risks and provide an even higher level of service to our independent agents."