Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to educate insurance actuaries on the use of wildfire risk datasets and models to be developed by researchers from academia and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Description: Ever wanted to do a Kaggle data science competition, but didn't know where to start? This presentation meets the needs of actuaries interested in predictive analytics and competitive data science. The presentation will describe the nature of competitive data science, and provide insights into lessons learned by competing in the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge at Kaggle, as well as other Kaggle competitions. The presenters will provide an introduction to neural networks and describe the nature of the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge and other Kaggle competitions, plus a solution approaches that can be used to obtain top scores using Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs), random forests and boosted trees.