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Neural Networks Demystified by Louise Francis Francis Analytics and Actuarial Data Mining, Inc. louise_francis@msn.com. Objectives of Paper. Introduce actuaries to neural networks Show that neural networks are a lot like some conventional statistics
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Neural Networks Demystifiedby Louise FrancisFrancis Analytics and Actuarial Data Mining, Inc.louise_francis@msn.com
Objectives of Paper • Introduce actuaries to neural networks • Show that neural networks are a lot like some conventional statistics • Indicate where use of neural networks might be helpful • Show how to interpret neural network models
Data Mining • Neural networks are one of a number of data mining techniques • Methods primarily developed in artificial intelligence and statistical disciplines to find patterns in data • Typically applied to large databases with complex relationships
Some Other Data Mining Methods • Decision trees • Clustering • Regression splines • Association rules
Some Data Mining Advantages • Nonlinear relationships • Interactions • Multicollinearity
Data Mining: Neural Networks • One of more established approaches • Somewhat glamorous • AI description: they function like neurons in the brain
Neural Networks: Disadvantages • They are a black box • User gets a prediction from them, but the form of the fitted function is not revealed • Don’t know which variables are the most important in the prediction
Kinds of Neural Networks • Supervised learning • Multilayer perceptron • Also known as backpropagation neural network • Paper explains this kind of NN • Unsupervised learning • Kohonen neural networks
THREE LAYER NEURALNETWORK Hidden Layer (Processes Data) Input Layer (Input Data) Output Layer (Predicted Value) The MLP Neural Network
The Activation Function • The sigmoid logistic function
Other • Data is usually normalized • Usually both independent and dependent variables transformed to lie in range between 0 and 1
Fitting the curve • Typically use a procedure which is like gradient descent
Table 4 W0 W1 Node 1 -4.107 7.986 Node 2 6.549 -7.989 Fitted Weights
Table 5 W0 W1 W2 6.154 -3.0501 -6.427 Hidden Layer
Table 6 Computation of Predicted Values for Selected Values of X (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) ((1)-508)/4994 6.15-3.05*(3)-6.43*(4) 1/(1+exp(-(5)) 6.52+3.56*(6) X Normalized X Output of Node 1 Output of Node 2 Weighted Hidden Node Output Output Node Logistic Function Predicted Y 508.48 0.00 0.016 0.999 -0.323 0.420 7.889 1,503.00 0.22 0.088 0.992 -0.498 0.378 7.752 3,013.40 0.56 0.596 0.890 -1.392 0.199 7.169 4,994.80 1.00 0.980 0.190 1.937 0.874 9.369 Selected Fitted Values for function
Universal Function Approximator • The multilayer perceptron neural network with one hidden layer is a universal function approximator • Theoretically, with a sufficient number of nodes in the hidden layer, any nonlinear function can be approximated
Correlated Variables • Variables used in model building are often correlated. • It is difficult to isolate the effect of the individual variables because of the correlation between the variables.
Correlated Variables: An Example • Workers Compensation Line • Produce an economic inflation index • Wage Inflation • Medical Inflation • Benefit Level Index • In simplified example no other variable drives severity results
Factor Analysis Example X1 = b1 Factor1 X2 = b2 Factor1 X3 = b3 Factor1 Index =.395 (Wage Inflation)+.498(Medical Inflation)+.113(Benefit Level Inflation)
Interpreting Neural Network • Look at weights to hidden layer • Compute sensitivities: • a measure of how much the predicted value’s error increases when the variables are excluded from the model one at a time
Table 9: Factor Example Parameters Table 10 W0 Sensitivities of Variables in Factor Example W1 W2 W3 Benefit Level 2.549 -2.802 23.6% -3.010 0.662 Medical Inflation 33.1% Wage Inflation 6.0% Interpretation of Neural Network
Interactions: Another Modeling Problem • Impact of two variables is more or less than the sum of their independent impacts.