Tag Archives: København

Talk in København

Tomorrow, I will give a talk at København Universiteit, on Using optimal transport to quantify and mitigate unfair insurance predictions. It is based on recent work with François Hu and Philipp Ratz (2310.20508, 2309.06627, 2306.12912 and 2306.10155).

The insurance industry is heavily reliant on predictions of risks based on characteristics of potential customers. Although the use of said models is common, researchers have long pointed out that such practices perpetuate discrimination based on sensitive features such as gender or race. Given that such discrimination can often be attributed to historical data biases, an elimination or at least mitigation is desirable. With the shift from more traditional models to machine-learning based predictions, calls for greater mitigation have grown anew, as simply excluding sensitive variables in the pricing process can be shown to be ineffective. In this talk, we first investigate why predictions are a necessity within the industry and why correcting biases is not as straightforward as simply identifying a sensitive variable. We then propose to ease the biases through the use of Wasserstein barycenters instead of simple scaling. To demonstrate the effects and effectiveness of the approach we employ it on real data and discuss its implications. The talk will be based on a recent textbook (978-3-031-49782-7) as well as work with François Hu and Philipp Ratz (2310.20508, 2309.06627, 2306.12912 and 2306.10155).

Trip in (Northern) Europe

The next two weeks, in will be in (Northern) Europe, with a first stop in Brussels (to visit colleagues), then in Leuven (I will give a talk on Monday at KU Leuven), then in København (I will give a talk on Friday at Københavns Universitet), and finally in Stockholm (at Stockholm University, for the Insurance Data Science conference).

In the Fall, I will be in Europe, with Lisbon (European Actuarial Journal conference), in France (Cerisy Colloques) and in Warsaw in Poland. In Poland, I will give a two day cours on Insurance, Biases, Discrimination and Fairness

More to come soon…