Tuesday January 17, 2023 @ 9:00 AM in Sobel Seminar (South Hall 5607F)

 

Big Data and Algorithms: Industry and Regulatory Concerns

 

Big data and algorithms have become ubiquitous in all areas of insurance, deployed in automated decisioning systems, often with little human oversight. The resulting decisions disproportionately affect communities of color with disparate impacts. The death of George Floyd on national TV resulted in an awakening across many sectors of business, including insurance. Regulators are focused on identifying bias in insurance algorithms and holding insurance companies accountable for resulting disparate impacts. This presentation will highlight the regulatory issues and the response from the insurance industry on its responsibility for the issues. It will also examine how academia can help clarify the arguments and the math on both sides to aid in the facilitation of possible solutions. 

Dorothy Andrews is the Senior Behavioral Data Scientist for the NAIC, where she focuses on analyzing insurance company rating models, reporting to state insurance regulators directly about her analyses, providing related regulatory training, and designing approaches to identify adverse bias in algorithmic outcomes resulting from insurance models. She has more than 25 years of actuarial and statistical modeling experience with life insurance companies, property and casualty insurance companies, reinsurance companies, international consulting firms, and government agencies. She is an adjunct faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the Mathematics and Statistics Department, teaching predictive analytics. 

 

Dorothy is an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries,  and a Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics (CSPA).  She is currently working on a Ph.D. in Media Psychology. Her research focus is on how big data and machine learning algorithms are altering our perceptions of risk and our ability to become self-determined. She believes that because insurance is becoming mediated more and more by mobile, wearable, and AI technologies, automated decision-making algorithms require human oversight to ensure they are operating ethically and with transparency to prevent disparate impacts across the insurance consumer population.