Tomorrow, around noon, I will be giving a talk on predictive modeling for actuaries. In the introduction, I will get back shortly on the idea that a prediction is usually a best estimate, in the sense of getting an expected value. And because

it is natural to use least square ideas. In order to illustrate all those concepts, we will use a simple dataset, with the sex, the height and the weight of a person, as well as declared weight.

Davis=read.table(
"http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Books/Applied-Regression-2E/datasets/Davis.txt")

Since there is a typo in this dataset, we have to invert to figures

Davis[12,c(2,3)]=Davis[12,c(3,2)]

but it’s not a big deal. The variable of interest, here, is someone’s weight

attach(Davis)
Y=weight*2.204622

(here in pounds). We will use explanatory variables such as the sex of that person, or his/her height

X=Davis$height / 30.48

(in inches). So, we will start with the (standard) linear model, just to make sure that we all talk about the same thing.

The goal will be to use (possible) explanatory variable to improve our prediction. We will start with the standard linear model, but we will see that nonlinear models can also easily be obtained,

Non linearities will be discussed. But those models are Gaussian (as mentioned above). And homoscedastic. So we will see how generalized linear models can be used to model the mean and the variance, at the same time. For instance, with a Poisson regression (below), the variance will increase with the expected value.

After this general introduction, we will spend some time on 0-1 variables. We will see how to use a logistic regression, and also discuss more generally which kind of models can be used for classification. ROC curves will be presented, and explained.

Then, we will also see an alternative to the logistic model, namely classification trees and CART techniques

We will also discuss random forrests, bagging and boosting techniques

A pdf version of the slides can be downloaded.

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