About the Course

Welcome to my insurance and actuarial analytics course that has a focus on survival models.

Course Philosophy

This course will be an interactive introduction to analytics in an actuarial context.

To introduce analytics, we will be working with real data comparable to what professional actuaries see in their work. Because the data are typically real - not artificial, we will need statistical software. This course uses what is becoming the industry standard, R. This is a freely available software that has a bit of learning curve and this is what this course will help you with.

The course does not assume that participants have a background in R nor even in actuarial applications. However, to give you exposure to many models and applications, we will move at a fast pace. One of the goals of this course is to expose you to many freely available resources (e.g., R, RStudio, Datacamp, and so on) that you can readily use in your future classes and professional career.

Course Approach

Each topic will consist of a lecture, group discussion, and hands-on exercises. Expect us to rotate through several topics each day. The hands-on exercises consist of participants working through R code, using the software to analyze real data. An ideal approach is for participants to work in pairs so that one person can focus on details and the other can think about direction. Thus, I am hoping that at least half of the participants will be bring their own laptops. Of course, I'll be happy to run the code for the group with an overhead projector but you will learn better if you run the code yourselves.

Because of this course approach, there are several things that you can do in advance of the seminar that will make your experience better. See my summary on Preparation. But, I know (from personal experience) that people get busy. Even if you don't have time to complete all my suggested preparations, I hope that you still find this to be a beneficial and informative course.