Professors Emiliano A. Valdez, Jeyaraj Vadiveloo and Guojun Gan have been awarded a Center of Actuarial Excellence (CAE) research grant from the Society of Actuaries. The grant will support a three-year (2017-2020) research project on “Applying Data Mining Techniques in Actuarial Science” which aims to examine and evaluate data mining tools and approaches for analyzing data in actuarial science and insurance. In particular, they will focus on tools and methods that will effectively demonstrate on how actuaries can use them to preform predictive analytics in three specific areas: claims tracking and monitoring in life insurance, understanding policyholder behavior in general insurance, and model efficiency for variable annuity products.

This research grant is part of a competition that is sponsored by the Society of Actuaries each year for schools that have received the CAE designation. The submission process involves passing two rounds that make it extremely competitive and the review process normally takes about 5-6 months till final decision. In the first round, interested CAE universities must submit a brief letter of intent with a summary of proposed research project. In 2016, 18 CAE schools submitted letters of intent and only about half were invited to submit a full proposal in the second round. Full proposals are then judged according to five criteria: impact, cost-benefit, uniqueness, viability, and overall quality. Each year, only about 2-3 universities receive an education or research grant.

This is the first time that the SOA awarded such a research grant to the University of Connecticut. Other universities that have received such grants include University of Waterloo, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Michigan. A complete list of past CAE grant awards may be found here (https://www.soa.org/Education/Resources/Cae/edu-cae-grants-award-history.aspx).

A website detailing the UConn research grant may be found on this link