Two of our Statistics graduate students, Yue Du and Broderick Prows were one of the winning teams at the Travelers Insurance Modeling Competition that took place on Kaggle. 

Yue shared the following regarding the competition: “The competition was held on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/c/2020-modeling-competition/overview/description) and we heard about it from Dr. Wu and Saule. The goal of the competition was to build a model to predict the auto insurance claim cost for each policy based on historical auto claim data. The claim cost is zero-inflated and highly right skewed. Gini index was utilized to evaluate the model. Teams with a higher score than the benchmark can move to the presentation stage. We presented our prediction and analysis results as well as business insights. They expect us to make real world connections to the model results. Around two weeks after the presentation, they announced the winning teams. The final model we used for this competition was the Gradient Tree-Boosted Tweedie Compound Poisson model.”

Congratulations to Yue and Broderick on their accomplishment!