Insurance issues cover a broad spectrum. There are insurance companies that need specialized knowledge to estimate risk in unusual situations. In these situations, there are questions about the size of the population (who was put at risk?), the change in the population, the time that the risk was present (when did it start, when did it end), and who was at risk when (for different segments of the population, how long were they exposed to the risk?). Basic actuarial methods will only take a researcher so far in addressing complex questions when the population itself is unknown or changing
There are also insurance issues regarding the risk the insurer is covering. There are times that an insurer or a reinsurer is asked to offer coverage, only to find out that the population being covered is extended (made larger through over-inclusion) or that the risk being hedged was understated. In these cases, a complex combination of sampling, risk measurement, and valuation are needed to determine how big a group is at risk and how big the risk really was at the time that the policy was issued.
