We illustrate how multistate Markov and semi-Markov models can be used for the actuarial modeling of health insurance policies, focussing on health insurances that are pursued on a similar technical basis to that of life insurance. On the basis of the general modeling framework of Helwich (2008), we study examples of permanent health insurance, critical illness insurance, long term care insuran...

Morton-Firth and Bray's stochastic simulator (StochSim) and Gillespie's stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) are two important methods for stochastic modelling and simulation of biochemical systems. They have been widely applied to different biological problems. A key question is discussed here: Are these two methods equivalent? These two methods are compared using fundamental probability anal...

A method to store each element of an integral memory set M subset {1,2,...,K}/sup n/ as a fixed point into a complex-valued multistate Hopfield network is introduced. The method employs a set of inequalities to render each memory pattern as a strict local minimum of a quadratic energy landscape. Based on the solution of this system, it gives a recurrent network of n multistate neurons with comp...

Stochastic models of evolution (Markov random fields on trivalent trees) generally assume that different characters (different runs of the stochastic process) are independent and identically distributed. In this paper we take the first steps towards addressing dependent characters. Specifically we show that, under certain technical assumptions regarding the evolution of individual characters, w...