Description: Often actuarial practitioners are faced with working with data that is less than ideal. The data may be observed with gaps in it, a model may suggest variables that are observed at different frequencies, and sometimes predictive analytic results are very fragile to the inclusion or omission of just a few observations in the sample. Data, particularly big data, are often "messy" and something must be done about it. What is the actuary to do about these very practical matters? These types of questions are what this presentation is intended to address. Concerns on missing data, outliers, nonlinearity, mixed-frequency, cross-correlations are illustrated using real datasets in the Asia-Pacific countries. Some possible solutions to the messy data problems will be discussed.

Description: Highlights of two 2018 health events organized by the Colombian Association of Actuaries and sponsored by the Colombian Government. Seminar on Risk Adjustment and Predictive Modeling in Health. Seminar on Risk Management for the Health Insurers

Description: You’ve built or updated a predictive model. Is it any good? How can you interpret and understand its predictions? How does it compare to alternative models? This session will look at traditional and non-traditional ways of validating predictive models, with examples from case studies.

Description: An introduction to the methods and parameters for Bayesian Hyperparameter Optimization in a Life Insurance context.

Description: In this article we examine the benefits and drawbacks of using a global surrogate of a black-box model. Are surrogates a comfortable middle ground that provide insurers high predictive power as well as model explainability?

Description: Health claims are not normally distributed. Claims Forecasting can be improved by understanding the entire distribution of plausible values of future claims, for example knowing there is an 80% chance future claims are between $340 and $375 PMPM. Confidence intervals around our estimates allow us to understand for each range around the best estimate (for example +/- 1%) what is the probability that future claims will fall in that range. Quantile Regression is a mathematical technique where you can estimate any percentile of the claims distribution you are looking for as a function of demographics, diagnosis indicators, prior cost variables, or other significant predictors. You can see which coefficients are important at different parts of the distribution. Individual and group distributions can be constructed. There are numerous applications in pricing and underwriting, stop loss, provider profiling, ACO target setting, allocation of group risk charges based on volatility, discounting strategy, and experience analysis.

Description: A significant fraction of insurance risk is characterized by the tail of the claims distribution, where we have much less data to model probabilities accurately. Ignoring the tails can lead to underpricing of tail risk and mispricing. Estimation of the tails can be complex due to a bias-variance tradeoff--the further out we go into the tail the more accurately we can model the extreme tail (lower bias) but the less data we have (increased variance). The statistical tools of Extreme Value Theory can be leveraged to more accurately estimate both the incidence and the severity of extreme events given that they occur. using the Generalized Pareto Distribution.

Description: Increasing technology is available to create and disseminate educational resources worldwide. In response, this article advocates creation of open educational resources (OERs) that will benefit the actuarial profession with both recruitment and retention of members. Specifically, we describe OER contributions made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and more recently through the ASTIN Academy, a working group of ASTIN, the non-life section of the International Actuarial Association. We advocate pushing boundaries and creating new ways of teaching effectively for the future. The innovative use of technology and open-source materials is a way to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the actuarial profession.

Description: Discussion of machine learning applications currently being used to augment traditional actuarial modeling in the life insurance industry. This includes data science techniques for: Quantifying and explaining differences between model versions or reporting periods Building proxy models for actuarial model output using machine learning One-class classification for data integrity checks Applications of unsupervised learning (e.g., clustering and principal components analysis) to reduce model run time

Description: Actuarial concepts of credibility can be extended to encompass additional information provided by new machine learning estimates. New statistical ideas also indicate how to generalize to blend arbitrarily many estimators, while not double-counting common information. For example, historical claim costs and risk scores both leverage diagnosis code information. We introduce two new estimators, one based on partial correlation and the other based on the machine learning-derived Shapley statistic, to address these limitations.