­

­

­

­

We hope you and your families had a great start into the new year and are excited to send you the first Early Bird Newsletter in 2022:
Benefit from the Early Bird discounts of many EAA's Web Sessions taking place in March and April 2022 with early bird rates in January and February 2022. Furthermore, you are invited to visit our website for all published online trainings here.

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session "Practical Application of Clustering in Insurance" on 16 February 2022, 9:00-12:15 CET

­

­

­

­

­

Actuarial analytics found its way into several areas of the insurance value chain, mostly through the use of tools from supervised learning such as linear or tree-based regression. On the other hand, unsupervised learning, such as partitional clustering, seems to be used rather less despite its potential to gain insights into high-dimensional insurance data sets.
Cluster analysis is the task of grouping a set of objects (often data points) in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar to each other than to those in other groups. In contrast to simple segmentation (e.g. by geographical location only), Clustering uses several features to differentiate among those groups. Potential applications are manifold and centred around questions such as, for example:

• In which customer segments do we mainly generate new business?
• Which typical customer should we have in mind while designing new insurance products?
• How can we make use of granular information, such as diagnose or treatment codes, for example, while dealing with a limited number of observations or claims?

The course provides an introduction into clustering that does not require any previous knowledge in this area and shall give the participant a jump start to work on his/her own problems. Thus we put a focus on typical stumbling blocks arising when clustering techniques are applied in practice such as interpretability, missing values and mixed data types.
Your early-bird registration fee is € 150.00 plus 19% VAT until 5 January 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 205.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session "Operational Risk for Actuaries" on 3/4 March 2022, 10:00-12:00 CET

­

­

­

­

­

Operational risk is the risk of loss, arising from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events. That is the definition of operational risk for regulatory purposes. Operational risk management is usually part of ERM and actuaries are typically not involved in these processes. That is often because of poor data related to rare events and some lack of methodologies. The goal of this web session is to provide actuaries with tools and ideas how to better involve in operational risk management and how to use existing actuarial toolboxes to improve valuation of operational risk.
The web session will cover a broad range of topics in operational risk management that are relevant to actuarial practice. The content of the session follows a similar structure as the AAE paper "Actuaries and Operational Risk Management".
Your early-bird registration fee is € 200.00 plus 19% VAT until 20 January 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 270.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session "Introduction to Effective Visuals with ggplot2" on 8 March 2022, 10:00-12:00 CET

­

­

­

­

­

Data visualization skills are essential to analyse large amounts of information and make data-driven decisions. There is not an insurance professional that doesn't benefit from making data more understandable.
In this session, you will learn how to create elegant and effective visuals with the R package: ggplot2.
While R provides several systems to produce graphs, ggplot2 is the most flexible and elegant graphical framework available.
Many examples specific to insurance will be provided so that you can apply the concepts to your own work as effortlessly as possible.
In addition to ggplot2 syntax, you will learn fundamental principles of what constitutes an effective visual.
We ask you to have RStudio installed as well as 'tidyverse' package attached in your session so you are able to solve the exercise that will be provided.
Your early-bird registration fee is € 100.00 plus 19% VAT until 25 January 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 140.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session: "ML Explainability in Actuarial Data Science: A Primer" on 10 March 2022, 9:00-16:30 CET

­

­

­

­

­

These days, nobody disputes the profound impact and yet-untouched potential of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence anymore. Yet, in the actuarial sciences, these breakthrough possibilities are hampered by regulation, the need for numerical confidence and insight into model decision making, the latter being subsumed as a "black box problem". Thus, the quest for explainability is in fact much more pressing than in any other industry.
This upcoming seminar on ML explainability aims to provide insights into the areas of unsupervised learning, supervised learning and artificial neural nets via model-agnostic explainability approaches.
Explainability is the cornerstone of practicability of ML and AI techniques - without thorough insights into the inner workings of the more advanced decision making and prediction methods, usage become hampered by the worst kind of information asymmetry: Unpredictable model outputs not fit for productive use. Ultimately, AI and ML methods will be well-suited for use in actuarial contexts, but to this end, more and better tools to understand these tools need to be procured and utilized.
Your early-bird registration fee is € 300.00 plus 19% VAT until 27 January 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 400.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session: "An Introduction to Economic Scenario Generators and their Validation" on 14/15 March 2022, 10:00-15:00 CET

­

­

­

­

­

The Economic Scenario Generators are at the core of stochastic models used by insurance companies. The applications of stochastic models are very diverse and include such applications as economic capital under Solvency II, ALM projections, dynamic hedging etc. All these applications impose different requirements upon the generation and the validation of economic scenarios.
In the web session, we begin by discussing the principles of risk-neutral modelling, where we are going to focus on equity modelling and interest rate modelling. We proceed by discussing real-world capital market modelling. Finally, we talk about ESG validation aspects relevant for Solvency 2 work and other applications.
Your early-bird registration fee is € 400.00 plus 19% VAT until 31 January 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 520.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session: "Practical Machine Learning Applications in Finance and Insurance" on 16 March 2022, 9:00-12:00 CET

­

­

­

­

­

Artificial intelligence is currently on everybody's lips and seems to be vital for industry to be successful at the market. Researchers and practitioners are learning the basic techniques of machine learning to develop new products and improve analyses including forecasting, among others. We are highly interested in improving processes and applications in companies, in particular to make better decisions and developing high-end products. More and more researchers from different disciplines use deep learning techniques to understand and explain phenomena and relationships better. This web session aims at introducing and building machine learning techniques with the focus on regression and classification problems. We consider the sound application on several practical problems in finance and insurance. Hereby, we introduce how to implement machine learning techniques in Python, with the goal to put the participants in the position to solve any specific problem of interest.
Your early-bird registration fee is € 150.00 plus 19% VAT until 2 February 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 205.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Web Session: "Communication for Actuaries" on 28-31 March 2022, 9:30-13:00 CEST

­

­

­

­

­

The Communication for Actuaries course is tailor-made for actuaries and the situations that you encounter. It is an interactive training course that ensures that the theory is immediately applied through various exercises (e.g. exchanges in small groups, role-plays, discussions) that relate to terms or situations of your day-to-day work.
The course is designed to give you a solid foundation on the topic of communication and to practice what you learn so you can use the gained knowledge in areas that are relevant for your work. The last day offers you the opportunity to make a short presentation specific to your work for which you will be given individual feedback. At the end of the course, you will know exactly how to tackle your next communication challenge.

The overall 12-hour course covers specific topics like:
• Communication patterns/models, types of behavior/learning
• Verbal, non-verbal and written communication skills
• Virtual communication
• Presentation (as if "on stage" and "on screen") skills
• Discussion & Negotiation

During the web session, the participants will learn to:
• Communicate effectively a clear message to any stakeholder
• Make sure that the message is being understood (Make the "complicated" "easy-to-understand" to non-actuaries)
• Structure their thoughts and findings in an effective way
• Recognize which patterns/words can have the best impact for which target group
• Practice in writing, in role plays and in presenting
• Participate/lead discussions and negotiations effectively
• Use their voice in a healthy and stable way
• Increase the chance of achieving their objectives with their work
• Come across as credible, knowledgeable and constructive business partners

The communication topics 9.1.1. to 9.1.8. of the AAE Core Syllabus are sufficiently to fully covered within this course.

Your early-bird registration fee is € 600.00 plus 19% VAT until 14 February 2022. After this date, the fee will be € 780.00 plus 19% VAT.
further details

­

­

­