The Actuarial Society

~ Sabyasachi Rathore The world of the stock market is full of ups and downs. These ups and downs are coined as a boom and slump in the market by professionals. The overall degree of profit or loss that investors make is directly connected to whether the market is bullish or bearish. Despite the unpredictable nature of the market, it is possible to make an assumption whether the share prices will rise or fall. One of the ways to predict is insider trading which is illegal in India. Ruling this out, we have a legitimate way of achieving this via statistics. The simplest way an investor can use statistics to make profit is by checking the history of the shares he/she wants to invest in. For instance, if the price of a share has been decreasing for a while and the company is planning to launch a new product then buying shares of that company will prove to be profitable.  There are different approaches on how your profits can be guaranteed. A common strategy used by players in the marke...

~ Kshitij Srivastava “ You can’t improve what you can’t measure” -Peter Drucker  In the fast-flying world of aviation, airlines have to be at the top of their game to remain competitive, and statistics are a useful tool in this pursuit. Airlines use statistics to provide them with vital information regarding viability of routes, future profitability, and to make flight plans. Moreover, statistics are also used in meteorology for weather forecasting, which is crucial for air traffic movement. The Sky in Numbers At any point of time, 8,000 to 20,000 planes are flying in the skies connecting a total of 41,820 airports in the world in a $400 billion industry. The meticulous and complicated planning required to keep this industry up and running is fueled by business insights derived by carefully analyzing all sorts of data. Thus, the fields of statistics, data science and big data have valuable contributions to aviation. Airlines have access to huge amounts of data on a regular basis....

From medical sciences to space sciences, weather forecasting to banking, computing the chances of winning the lottery to predicting the stock price movements and from psychology to actuarial science, probability and statistics is everywhere!  By definition, statistics is a form of mathematical analysis that uses quantified models, representations and synopses for a given set of experimental data or real-life studies. In simple terms, statistics is that branch of applied mathematics that deals with data collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation. In this article we will understand the importance of statistics and probability and their applications in various domains, conventional and otherwise.  Why is understanding probability important? Probability, in the most crude terms, is a number that reflects the chance or likelihood that a particular event will occur. We use probability in daily life to make decisions when we are not sure what the outcome will...