SKL Consultants Almari Edwards and Aaliyah Gunaratne attended the Statistical Machine Learning Fundamentals – a crash course given by the Actuaries Institute.Presenters Alex Rowley and Andres Villegas covered several interesting points in the first of the series on Machine Learning.

Topics covered included:

• The opportunities, benefits and concerns with using machine learning algorithms in the actuarial field
• Comparison of Machine Learning and conventional statistical techniques
• Exploration of types of machine learning algorithms and how they work
• Recognizing potential obstacles to the implementation.

The session concluded with a 20 minute question period to address issues that came up.

The institute is following this session up with a further 3 seminars in which they will explore in further detail the possibilities of Machine Learning in the actuarial field.