Introduction¶

Open Actuarial is a group for the promotion of open approaches to actuarial problems.

This organisation aims to:

Identify the main areas where open tools can benefit actuarial analyses
Support and publicise existing open tools that can help actuarial analysis
Aid in the development of new tools, especially where gaps in the available toolset exist
Educate the actuarial community on the availability, benefits and occasional downsides of open tools

Getting Started¶

Resources on how to get started with programming.

Below are some of the areas where the actuarial community can benefit from open tools:

core probabilistic functions ala Actuar including blended distributions e.g. mixed exponential, mixed pareto, etc
curve fitting
dependency modelling and parameterisation
data manipulation and charting tools

Standardised data dictionaries/glossaries
Tools for the transformation of data from formats typically used in administration systems to those suitable for analysis
Real datasets
Dummy datasets (useful where either real data is unavailable for commercial reasons and for ensuring that actuarial analyses work appropriately)

tools for generalised linear regression, mixed models, survival analysis, bayesian analysis, machine learning

Applying DevOps principles to Actuarial work:

Collaboration and Version control (Git, TFS, Mecurical, SVN)
Testing (unit tests, speed tests, test-driven development)
Continuous integration
Push button deployments
Development, Testing and Production environments (virtualisation and containers)
‘Big Data’ architectures