Panyi Dong

Panyi Dong, Zhiyu Quan

Machine Learning (ML) has gained popularity in actuarial research and insurance industrial applications. However, the performance of most ML tasks heavily depends on data preprocessing, model selection, and hyperparameter optimization, which are considered to be intensive in terms of domain knowledge, experience, and manual labor. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) aims to automatically complete the full life-cycle of ML tasks and provides state-of-the-art ML models without human intervention or supervision. This paper introduces an AutoML workflow that allows users without domain knowledge or prior experience to achieve robust and effortless ML deployment by writing only a few lines of code. This proposed AutoML is specifically tailored for the insurance application, with features like the balancing step in data preprocessing, ensemble pipelines, and customized loss functions. These features are designed to address the unique challenges of the insurance domain, including the imbalanced nature of common insurance datasets. The full code and documentation are available on the GitHub repository. (https://github.com/PanyiDong/InsurAutoML)

Panyi Dong, Zhiyu Quan, Brandon Edwards et al.

The report demonstrates the benefits (in terms of improved claims loss modeling) of harnessing the value of Federated Learning (FL) to learn a single model across multiple insurance industry datasets without requiring the datasets themselves to be shared from one company to another. The application of FL addresses two of the most pressing concerns: limited data volume and data variety, which are caused by privacy concerns, the rarity of claim events, the lack of informative rating factors, etc.. During each round of FL, collaborators compute improvements on the model using their local private data, and these insights are combined to update a global model. Such aggregation of insights allows for an increase to the effectiveness in forecasting claims losses compared to models individually trained at each collaborator. Critically, this approach enables machine learning collaboration without the need for raw data to leave the compute infrastructure of each respective data owner. Additionally, the open-source framework, OpenFL, that is used in our experiments is designed so that it can be run using confidential computing as well as with additional algorithmic protections against leakage of information via the shared model updates. In such a way, FL is implemented as a privacy-enhancing collaborative learning technique that addresses the challenges posed by the sensitivity and privacy of data in traditional machine learning solutions. This paper's application of FL can also be expanded to other areas including fraud detection, catastrophe modeling, etc., that have a similar need to incorporate data privacy into machine learning collaborations. Our framework and empirical results provide a foundation for future collaborations among insurers, regulators, academic researchers, and InsurTech experts.

Jiayi Guo, Panyi Dong, Zhiyu Quan

When working with real-world insurance data, practitioners often encounter challenges during the data preparation stage that can undermine the statistical validity and reliability of downstream modeling. This study illustrates that conventional data preparation procedures such as random train-test partitioning, often yield unreliable and unstable results when confronted with highly imbalanced insurance loss data. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel data preparation framework leveraging two recent statistical advancements: support points for representative data splitting to ensure distributional consistency across partitions, and the Chatterjee correlation coefficient for initial, non-parametric feature screening to capture feature relevance and dependence structure. We further integrate these theoretical advances into a unified, efficient framework that also incorporates missing-data handling, and embed this framework within our custom InsurAutoML pipeline. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using both simulated datasets and datasets often cited in the academic literature. Our findings definitively demonstrate that incorporating statistically rigorous data preparation methods not only significantly enhances model robustness and interpretability but also substantially reduces computational resource requirements across diverse insurance loss modeling tasks. This work provides a crucial methodological upgrade for achieving reliable results in high stakes insurance applications.

Panyi Dong, Zhiyu Quan

The growing reliance of machine learning models in high-stakes, highly regulated domains such as finance and insurance has created a growing tension between predictive performance, interpretability, and regulatory fairness requirements. In these settings, models are expected not only to deliver reliable predictions but also to provide transparent decision rationales and comply with strict fairness requirements. Attention-based transformers offer powerful mechanisms for modeling complex data relationships as demonstrated in various language tasks, yet their attention mechanisms alone do not ensure counterfactually fair predictions, even when combined with fairness-aware techniques. To address these limitations, we propose the Feature Correlation Transformer (FCorrTransformer), an attention-light architecture tailored for tabular data. In this design, the attention matrix admits a direct statistical interpretation as pairwise feature dependencies, enhancing both interpretability and efficiency. Leveraging this structure, we introduce Counterfactual Attention Regularization (CAR), a framework that enforces group-invariant fair representations of sensitive features at the attention level, promoting counterfactually fair predictions without relying on explicit causal assumptions. Empirical evaluations on imbalanced classification and regression benchmarks demonstrate that FCorrTransformer combined with CAR achieves strong counterfactual fairness while maintaining competitive predictive performance and substantially reducing model complexity compared with standard transformer-based baselines. Overall, this work bridges a critical gap between fairness theory and machine learning models, offering a practical framework for responsible AI in regulatory-sensitive domains.

Panyi Dong, Zhiyu Quan

With the rapid rise of InsurTech, traditional insurance companies are increasingly exploring alternative data sources and advanced technologies to sustain their competitive edge. This paper provides both a conceptual overview and practical case studies of natural language processing (NLP) and its emerging applications within insurance operations, focusing on transforming raw, unstructured text into structured data suitable for actuarial analysis and decision-making. Leveraging real-world alternative data provided by an InsurTech industry partner that enriches traditional insurance data sources, we apply various NLP techniques to demonstrate feature de-biasing, feature compression, and industry classification in the commercial insurance context. These enriched, text-derived insights not only add to and refine traditional rating factors for commercial insurance pricing but also offer novel perspectives for assessing underlying risk by introducing novel industry classification techniques. Through these demonstrations, we show that NLP is not merely a supplementary tool but a foundational element of modern, data-driven insurance analytics.