What it does
V-STAR is an open-source actuarial calculation engine written in Go. Its scope spans life-contingency calculations (present values, annuities and reserves), stochastic risk analysis, and processing policy data from CSV files. It brings actuarial operations that are often prototyped in spreadsheets or scripts into a codebase that can be inspected and run as software.
Calculation areas
- Valuation: net and gross premium reserves, using prospective and retrospective approaches.
- Cash flows: present-value calculations and annuity types including whole-life, term and deferred.
- Risk: Monte Carlo simulation with VaR and CTE measures.
- Data: CSV streaming for policy records, avoiding the need to load an entire input file at once.
Using the project
V-STAR can be explored through its Go library and command-line CSV reader. The repository is the source of truth for current APIs and setup:
./v-star read policies.csv --benchmarkCSV benchmark
The comparison below reports elapsed time and memory for a 10-million-row run. It gives a quick sense of the observed difference in this particular test, not a universal ranking.
One observed run per tool. Timings and memory use vary by hardware and comparison setup; run --benchmark locally to compare.