Emerging Topics Community: Return to Trees, Part 2: Single Decision Trees

In the final episode of this mini-series, Shea and Anders cover the other common tree-based ensemble model, the Gradient Boosting Machine. Like Random Forests, GBMs make use of a large number of decision trees, but they use a “boosting” approach that cleverly makes use of “weak learners” to incrementally extract information from the data. After an explanation of how GBMs work, we compare them to Random Forests and go over a few examples where they have used GBMs in their own work.

Nichole Semprit, The Actuarial Foundation Senior Program Specialist and  Channy Cornejo, AP Calculus and AP Statistics Instructor at Santa Teresa High School discuss how the Foundation math competitions, Modeling the Future Challenge and The Hardest Math Problem Student Contest help students expand their skills, build confidence and win college scholarships.

Listen in as host Jackie Lee talks with Joan Barrett about the recent research paper, “Calculated Risk: Driving Decisions Using the 5/50 Research.” The discussion and report will help you answer key questions like “what are the chances we will lose more than $1million.”

Join us for another exciting YPAC podcast as host Shawn Stender, FSA, MAAA, discusses unique actuarial career journeys with Lana Marozava, ASA, CERA, and Joe Long, ASA, MAAA. This podcast will shed light on the numerous different paths that young professionals can take on their journey to become an actuary. Whether that means changing careers from a teacher, project manager, or data scientist or just taking the exams at your own pace—this podcast will help young actuaries understand that there is more than one way to be successful in actuarial work.  

Join Frank Yeager, FSA and Chris Smith, ASA for an insightful discussion about leadership, the future of actuarial consulting, and the value of strong relationships. Frank shares his advice for aspiring and early-career actuaries gleaned over the course of a two-decade long career at Mercer that has culminated in his latest role as US Health Actuarial and Financial Group Leader.

Listen as host Jackie Lee talks with SOA President and Chair, Tim Rozar. They discuss Tim’s actuarial and volunteer background and the SOA’s goals for the year to come. Be sure to check out Tim’s Presidential address here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BG0AhwX6Ic  

Podcast on the industry adoption of emerging data sets across the insurance value chain. The participants include recognized leaders from business, regulation, legal, and innovation. The discussion covers current adoption practices, business opportunity, regulatory  and legal considerations.

Building on the discussion of individual decision trees in the prior episode, Shea and Anders shift to one of today’s most popular ensemble models, the Random Forest. At first glance, the algorithm may seem like a brute force approach of simply running hundreds or thousands of decision trees, but it leverages the concept of “bagging” to avoid overfitting and attempt to learn as much as possible from the entire data sets, not just a few key features. We close by covering strengths and weaknesses of this model and providing some real-life examples.

Dave Dillion and Bryon Robidoux discuss the book Dare to Lead, which was the Joint Risk Management and Leadership & Development Sections book club selection for December. They discuss what it means for managers to be vulnerable. How to give and receive feedback from both a manager’s perspective and the direct report perspective. The end the podcast talking about actuaries can be more curious and innovative.

What is professionalism?  Is it just following the law?  The code/rules of professional conduct?  Is it more than both of those? Listen to our podcast where YPAC member Patrick Samborsky, ASA, MAAA discusses professionalism with Charly J Pazdor, FSA retired, who has written about professionalism for The Actuary magazine as well as being a course director and facilitator for the FAC.