Addressing Analytics Challenges in the Insurance Industry. Noe Tuason California State Automobile Association

Transcription

1 Addressing Analytics Challenges in the Insurance Industry Noe Tuason California State Automobile Association

2 Overview Two Challenges: 1. Identifying High/Medium Profit who are High/Low Risk of Flight Prospects in the company s Internal Customers Database 2. Finding New Factors to Improve Pricing Model Methodologies are applicable to financial, retail, and other industries

3 Challenge 1 Identifying High Profit who are Low/High Risk of Flight Prospects in our Customers Database

4 Segmenting High Profit and Low Risk of Flight Customers Methodology for determining Risk of Flight Logistic Regression Using Insurance Customers Data Profitability (Loss Ratio Score) High Medium Low Risk of Flight Low 1 High Profit Stable 2 Medium Profit Stable 3 Low Profit Stable High 4 High Profit Likely to Leave 5 Medium Profit Likely to Leave 6 Low Profit Likely to Leave

5 Challenge: Identify and Differentiate the Stable-High/Medium Profit as well as the Likely to Leave-High/Medium Profit Customers from the Low Profit Customers in the Prospect Database Profitability (Loss Ratio Score) High Medium Low Risk of Flight Low 1 High Profit Stable 2 Medium Profit Stable 3 Low Profit Stable High 4 High Profit Likely to Leave 5 Medium Profit Likely to Leave 6 Low Profit Likely to Leave

6 Paradigm for Targeting High/Medium Profit and Low/High Risk of Flight Prospects in the Members Database Insurance Customer Segments Insurance Customers (Model) Membership Variables M1 M2.. Mn Members Database (Score) Demographics P1 P2.. Pn Membership Variables M1 M2.. Mn Demographics P1 P2.. Pn For prospecting in external databases

7 Differentiating Between the 3 Groups Within the Non-Insureds in the Prospect Database (AAA Members) Using CART Draw a sample of 10,000 insureds with segments and appended the following variables for modeling: Run CART 1 High Profit Stable 2 Medium Profit Stable 3 Low Profit Stable Demographics Lifestage MembershipVariables Transaction Variables 4 High Profit Likely to Leave 5 Medium Profit Likely to Leave 6 Low Profit Likely to Leave

8 Decision to use CART over Multinomial Logit or Discriminant Analysis CART is an acronym for Classification and Regression Trees, a decision-tree procedure introduced in 1984 by world-renowned UC Berkeley and Stanford statisticians,leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Richard Olshen, and Charles Stone. Handles discrete or continuous target variable No worries about linearity or normality assumptions Can handle categorical predictors without need to create dummy variables Could use missing values as valid category no need to do imputation Gives surrogate and competitive variables another way of handling missing values Automatic. Allows for overgrowing and pruning back. Recommends best tree Shows hierarchical interactions and impact of these interactions Gives Relative importance of variables Includes self-validation to avoid overit: holdout and n-ways cross validation Alternative splitting criteria depending on structure of data Can specify higher penalty for misclassification, e.g. misclassifying low risks cases

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10 Variables Relative Importance Variable SAMP_AGE$ LIFETIME_ERS_COUNT$ WEALTH$ ETHNCITY$ INCOME_BRACKET$ LIFESTAGE$ LENGTH_RESIDENCE$ MBS_STATUS$ EDUCATION$ GENDER$ MARITAL$ 6.65 MBS_PROGRAM$ 4.64 HAS_KIDS$ 2.99

11 % Correct Classification (test-holdout validation) Predicted Actual Class Total Cases Percent Correct 1 N=334 2 N=344 3 N=105 Stable H/M Profits % High Risk H/M Profits % Low Profit 66 88% Total: 783 Average: 77% Overall % Correct: 73%

12 Challenge 2 Finding New Factors to Optimize Pricing

13 Modeling Problem:* Insurance Pricing Models have different distributional assumptions, i.e. Poisson, Gamma, Lognormal, Negative Binomial, Tweddie, etc. Goal is to find one or two factors from over 200 geo-demographic variables that could be included in the company s pricing model that could improve pricing (lower premium without loss of profit) *Done for another client, not AAA

14 Procedures Used: SAS PROC VARCLUS (Variable Clustering) CART (Initial Variable Selection) MARS (Variable Selection, Creation of Functions to enter into the model) SAS PROC GENMOD (Poisson and Gamma Distribution)

15 Role that MARS played in my models: Multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) is a form of regression analysis introduced by Jerome Friedman in It is a non-parametric regression technique and can be seen as an extension of linear models that automatically models nonlinearities and interactions. Accounted for non-linear relationships by creating (basis) functions for splines (or departures from straight line). Handled missing values through a process similar to CART surrogate splitsby identifying alternative basis functions Like CART it initially overfits model then prunes away components that do not hold in the validation process. Entered the (basis) functions as predictors in PROC GENMOD

16 Screenshot of plots to illustrate departures from linearity assumptions. They are not accounted for by classical modeling approaches and highlights the importance of CART/MARS steps in modeling process flow.

17 Main Modeling Steps: Appended over 200 census-based variables to a sample of over 100,000 from the insurance database and kept claims frequencies and premium/loss information to compute target variables. Clustered variables (using SAS PROC VARCLUS) to explore data structure-reduced number of variables to 90 Ran dataset through CART (Exploratory Regression Tree) to find relative importance of potential predictors, check surrogates and competitive variables-noted variable importance. Target variables (separately) were Claims Counts and Severity (loss/claim) in dollars (both continuous)

18 Main Modeling Steps (cont): Ran dataset with 90 variables through MARS, compared to CART results-selected final set of variables that CART and MARS ranked as important reduced to 15 variables Ran MARS on 15 variables-obtain (Basis) Functions Built models using SAS PROC GENMOD using Claims Frequency and Severity (loss/claim) with different distributional assumptions as Targets and MARS (Basis) Functions as predictors Validated models in a holdout samples: final models had variables Pricing group tested variables with existing factors

19 Sample Results: Severity Model (Gamma Dist, Log Link) Predicted and Actual Losses Actual Loss Predicted Loss D E C I L E S

20 You can use the approach for any linear modeling including Multiple regression or Logistic Regression which are really part of the Family of Linear Models.