Estimating Car Insurance Premia: a Case Study in High-Dimensional Data Inference

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)

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Authors

Nicolas Chapados, Yoshua Bengio, Pascal Vincent, Joumana Ghosn, Charles Dugas, Ichiro Takeuchi, Linyan Meng

Abstract

Estimating insurance premia from data is a difficult regression problem for several reasons: the large number of variables, many of which are .discrete, and the very peculiar shape of the noise distri(cid:173) bution, asymmetric with fat tails, with a large majority zeros and a few unreliable and very large values. We compare several machine learning methods for estimating insurance premia, and test them on a large data base of car insurance policies. We find that func(cid:173) tion approximation methods that do not optimize a squared loss, like Support Vector Machines regression, do not work well in this context. Compared methods include decision trees and generalized linear models. The best results are obtained with a mixture of experts, which better identifies the least and most risky contracts, and allows to reduce the median premium by charging more to the most risky customers.