Is this blog dead? No, but you could be forgiven for thinking so. I will be posting a little more frequently than over the last year. That isn’t a high bar. Given the long silence, there are quite a few topics I’ve been thinking about and discussing with friends and colleagues. You’ll have to check …
Category archives: data analysis
Do Data Lakes hide Loch Ness Monsters?
I had a discussion with a client recently about the virtues of ensuring data written into a data warehouse is rock solid and understood and well defined. My training and experience has given me high confidence that this is the right way forward for typical actuarial data. Here I’m talking in force policy data files, …
ENID not Blyton
ENID is a term widely used, just generally not in South Africa. For some reason we didn’t import the term along with most of Solvency II. This has nothing to do with the Famous Five. While it is most common in the general insurance space, it is relevant across the spectrum of risk management and …
Claims analysis, inflation and discounting (part 1)
I’ve had the privilege to straddle life insurance and non-life insurance (P&C, general, short term insurance, take your pick of terms) in my career. On balance, I think having significant exposure to both has increased my knowledge in each rather than lessened the depth of my knowledge in either. I’ve been able to transport concepts …
Continue reading “Claims analysis, inflation and discounting (part 1)”
Modest data
I’m as excited as the next guy about the possibilities of “Big Data!” but possibly more excited about the opportunities presented by plain old “Modest Data”. I believe there is plenty of scope for useful analysis on fairly moderate data sets with the right approach and tools. I’d go as far as to say that …
Economic growth during and after Apartheid and the real problem with 1%
I read a letter from Pali Lehohla on news24 this weekend. Lehohla, the head of StatsSA, disagreed with a report by DaMina Advisors on economic growth in South Africa during and post the apartheid era. To paraphrase Lehohla, he disagreed with their methodology, their data and their values and ethics: First, I need to engage the …
Continue reading “Economic growth during and after Apartheid and the real problem with 1%”
Open mortality data
The Continuous Statistical Investment Committee of the Actuarial Society does fabulous work at gathering industry data and analysing it for broad use and consumption by actuaries and others. I can only begin to imagine the data horrors of dealing with multiple insurers, multiple sources, multiple different data problems. The analysis they do is critically useful …
The virtual irrelevancy of population size to required sample size
Statistics and sampling are fundamental to almost all of our understanding of the world. The world is too big to measure directly. Measuring representative samples is a way to understand the entire picture. Popular and academic literature are both full of examples of poor sample selection resulting in flawed conclusions about the population. Some of …
Continue reading “The virtual irrelevancy of population size to required sample size”