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President’s Award for input on the topic of data science

I am delighted to have received a President’s Award for input on data science from outgoing Institute and Faculty of Actuaries President Marjorie Ngwenya, FIA at yesterday’s AGM at Staple Inn in London.

The IFoA is a tremendously vibrant organisation and I believe IFoA and other actuaries have an important role to play in helping businesses and organisations make the most from the torrents of data becoming available, whilst also helping protect consumers from unethical use of such data. In particular, I am very pleased that the IFoA is collaborating with the Royal Statistical Society in the vital area of the ethical use of data in data science. (For example a joint event was held earlier this month on the Industrialisation and Professionalisation of Data Science)

The #2040Economy : how do we prepare for a world in which very few work?

#The2040Economy : in my opinion, every business, charity, school, government department, etc needs to harness appropriate data for their organisation as soon as possible and extract value from it, or it will be overtaken by competitors who do.

And we (society across the whole planet) need to prepare for a new economy in which very few work.

Think about it: how will your children (or grandchildren) cope in a world where the economy doesn’t need them to work? How will society as a whole finance support for them?

Azure Machine Learning Studio: the best place for initial data analysis?

While looking at a (relatively small, 1.7 million records) big data example of New York Yellow Cab taxi trips, I am coming to the conclusion that the best place (if as we do you are using Microsoft tools) for initial analysis, including the all important first step of finding outliers/errors, is Azure Machine Learning Studio (Azure ML, as opposed to Excel, Power BI or bespoke analysis using e.g. Kendo UI).

Why Azure ML for initial analysis?

It loads data quite quickly (e.g. just over a minute to import almost 2 million records from an Azure SQL database). This is currently much quicker than Power BI.
It automatically produces histograms and box plots of numeric fields (see the images below, and above, where the field FareAmount has been selected). We can tell immediately from the box plot that there are several outliers (and in fact probable errors that will need to be either corrected or removed, in that FareAmount should not have negative values!).

Why adding chatbots makes financial sense for your organisation

Adding a chatbot to your organisation’s website can provide a more interactive experience for your users while at the same time reducing demands on your staff’s time. Chatbots can help to:

free your team to deal with more complex enquiries or tasks
speed up employee training by providing a very accessible and intuitive source for staff to obtain information internally
automate complex workflows (such as providing quotes or booking services)
provide availability 24/7, 365 days a year
provide an alternative user interface for your apps than the traditional point and click menu/button system

Why do data scientists use R and Python, as opposed to other languages like C#?

As a “proper” programmer, used to programming in heavy duty, compiled languages like C# (and before that C++ and C), my reaction on discovering during my Data Science journey that R and Python are heavily used by data scientists was: why??

Why would anyone use an interpreted language, which is therefore bound to be slower, and why would anyone go to the trouble of using yet another language when there are perfectly good compiled languages around like C#, F# and VB.net?

The answer seems to be partly that R and Python are free (open source), and also because R and Python have excellent visualisation tools, which the other languages currently lack.

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InQA’s mission is to help individuals and organisations achieve worthwhile goals using our statistical and digital tools and expertise.

Our values are accuracy, efficiency and integrity via strong digital assets.

Digital tools are vital to achieve goals effectively. Why? Because if you haven’t yet gone digital, you will be operating at far less than full speed, and your competition will be overtake you.

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Want to go digital/move your business to the web/cloud or add chatbots to your site?Contact us

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