Tag Archives: Ewen

Exposé au séminaire de statistique (StatQAM)

Tomorrow, Ewen Gallic will present some recent work at the StatQAM statistical seminar, on calibration, with Agathe Fernandes Machado, François Hu, and Emmanuel Flachaire. It will substantially be based on our recent paper From Uncertainty to Precision: Enhancing Binary Classifier Performance through Calibration

The assessment of binary classifier performance traditionally centers on discriminative ability using metrics, such as accuracy. However, these metrics often disregard the model’s inherent uncertainty, especially when dealing with sensitive decision-making domains, such as finance or healthcare. Given that model-predicted scores are commonly seen as event probabilities, calibration is crucial for accurate interpretation. In our study, we analyze the sensitivity of various calibration measures to score distortions and introduce a refined metric, the Local Calibration Score. Comparing recalibration methods, we advocate for local regressions, emphasizing their dual role as effective recalibration tools and facilitators of smoother visualizations. We apply these findings in a real-world scenario using Random Forest classifier and regressor to predict credit default while simultaneously measuring calibration during performance optimization.

To illustrate, consider predictions about the gender of the person on the picture, including probabilities (confidence), obtained from https://www.picpurify.com/demo-face-gender-age.html, with fake pictures, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/21/science/artificial-intelligence-fake-people-faces.html.

From Uncertainty to Precision: Enhancing Binary Classifier Performance through Calibration

Our paper From Uncertainty to Precision: Enhancing Binary Classifier Performance through Calibration, written with Agathe Fernandes Machadoa, Emmanuel Flachaire, Ewen Gallic and François Hu is now online on ArXiv,

The assessment of binary classifier performance traditionally centers on discriminative ability using metrics, such as accuracy. However, these metrics often disregard the model’s inherent uncertainty, especially when dealing with sensitive decision-making domains, such as finance or healthcare. Given that model-predicted scores are commonly seen as event probabilities, calibration is crucial for accurate interpretation. In our study, we analyze the sensitivity of various calibration measures to score distortions and introduce a refined metric, the Local Calibration Score. Comparing recalibration methods, we advocate for local regressions, emphasizing their dual role as effective recalibration tools and facilitators of smoother visualizations. We apply these findings in a real-world scenario using Random Forest classifier and regressor to predict credit default while simultaneously measuring calibration during performance optimization.

Modeling Joint Lives within Families

With Olivier Cabrignac and Ewen Gallic, we recently uploaded a research paper, entitled “Modeling Joint Lives within Families

Family history is usually seen as a significant factor insurance companies look at when applying for a life insurance policy. Where it is used, family history of cardiovascular diseases, death by cancer, or family history of high blood pressure and diabetes could result in higher premiums or no coverage at all. In this article, we use massive (historical) data to study dependencies between life length within families. If joint life contracts (between a husband and a wife) have been long studied in actuarial literature, little is known about child and parents dependencies. We illustrate those dependencies using 19th century family trees in France, and quantify implications in annuities computations. For parents and children, we observe a modest but significant positive association between life lengths. It yields different estimates for remaining life expectancy, present values of annuities, or whole life insurance guarantee, given information about the parents (such as the number of parents alive). A similar but weaker pattern is observed when using information on grandparents.

The paper is online on https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08446.

Insurance data science : Pictures

At the Summer School of the Swiss Association of Actuaries, in Lausanne, following the part of Jean-Philippe Boucher (UQAM) on telematic data, I will start talking about pictures this Wednesday. Slides are available online

Ewen Gallic (AMSE) will present a tutorial on satellite pictures, and a simple classification problem, related to Alzeimher detection.

We will try to identify what is on the following pictures, starting with the car

(we will see that the car is indeed identified)

We will also discuss previous pictures from the summer school

Insurance data science : use and value of unusual data #1

Next week, with , I will be at the Summer School of the Swiss Association of Actuaries, in Lausanne, with Jean-Philippe Boucher (UQAM) and Ewen Gallic (AMSE).

I will give an introductionary talk on Monday morning, and the slides are now available

There will be some hands-on applications, on R. I will share some codes in the slides.

Démographie historique à l’aide de données généalogiques participatives

Voilà plusieurs mois qu’avec Ewen Gallic on travaille sur des données généalogiques. Le premier papier, Étude de la démographie française du XIXe siècle à partir de données collaboratives de généalogie est fini. Il s’agit d’une note métodologique, décrisant comment on a reconstitué les arbres de ces 2,45 millions de personnes (701 millions d’enregistrements dans lesquels il a fallu faire du ménage), correspondant aux descendants sur 3 générations de personnes nées en France, entre 1800 et 1804.

Pour illustrer l’apport de ces données riches, on a commencé par étudier la mortaiité au cours du XIXème siècle

et noté que, certes, on sous-estime la mortalité des moins de 20 ans, et des personnes très âgées, mais globalement, nos donnéees sont conformes à ce que nous attendions (peut être moins sur la natalité). On a également commencé à étudier la migration, de génération en génération

(ici la proportion de descendants nés dans le même département que leur aieux). Plein d’autres résultats, à lire dans le papier, en ligne sur hal et beaucoup d’autres résultats sur la page github créée par Ewen.

Shapefiles from Isodensity Curves

Recently, with @3wen, we wanted to play with isodensity curves. The problem is that it is difficult to get – numerically – the equation of the contour (even if we can easily plot it). Consider the following surface (just for fun, in order to illustrate the idea)

> f=function(x,y) x*y+(1-x)*(1-y)
> u=v=seq(0,1,length=21)
> v=seq(0,1,length=11)
> f=outer(u,v,f)
> persp(u,v,f,theta=angle,phi=10,box=TRUE,
+ shade=TRUE,ticktype="detailed",xlab="",
+ ylab="",zlab="",col="yellow")

For instance, assume that we want to locate areas where the density exceed 0.7 (here in the lower left corner, SW, and the upper right corner, NE)

> image(u,v,f)
> contour(u,v,f,add=TRUE,levels=.7)

Continue reading Shapefiles from Isodensity Curves

Kernel Density Estimation with Ripley’s Circumferential Correction

The revised version of the paper Kernel Density Estimation with Ripley’s Circumferential Correction is now online, on hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/.

In this paper, we investigate (and extend) Ripley’s circumference method to correct bias of density estimation of edges (or frontiers) of regions. The idea of the method was theoretical and difficult to implement. We provide a simple technique — based of properties of Gaussian kernels — to efficiently compute weights to correct border bias on frontiers of the region of interest, with an automatic selection of an optimal radius for the method. We illustrate the use of that technique to visualize hot spots of car accidents and campsite locations, as well as location of bike thefts.

There are new applications, and new graphs, too

Most of the codes can be found on https://github.com/ripleyCorr/Kernel_density_ripley (as well as datasets).