Flood Models are Biased, Because They are Models. But that's OK!

Posted by Ivan Maddox on Sep 1, 2015 10:44:00 AM

With the release of FloodScope , our risk assessment software, InsitePro , now comes with two flood models that users can use for evaluating USA flood. Having multiple flood models is useful for creating flood risk scoring analytics because it allows the scoring to consider more than one view of the risk, and to leverage a correlation analysis to account for the uncertainty aspect of a location’s risk; e.g., if two models agree, uncertainty goes down. Working with these two flood models also presents an opportunity to explore an aspect of flood models not frequently discussed in flood modeling literature: the bias. The two flood models that are available for all InsitePro users in the USA are FloodScope and WorldFlood , and they have demonstrably different biases.

What? Flood models are biased? 

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Topics: Flood Modeling, Flood Risk, Risk Models, Risk Scoring

How Risk Scoring Can Improve Underwriting: 4 Major Benefits

Posted by Ivan Maddox on Feb 10, 2015 2:53:00 PM

Other than the population of number-crunchers concentrated in lower Manhattan, (a.k.a the stock market), there is no other industry more enamored with — and dependent upon — huge amounts of data than insurance. To run their day-to-day businesses, insurers of all kinds depend upon everything from 100-year-old archives of policies and claims, to predictive analytics producing data for events that haven’t actually happened. 

Specifically, property insurers (as well as brokers and reinsurers) depend on natural catastrophe models, maps, building plans, and industrial machinery profiles, along with their own claims and policy data. The reason everyone needs to use so many datasets is that no single dataset is satisfactory, let alone comprehensive, for predicting the future (which is what every insurer is essentially trying to do every hour of every day).

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Topics: Insurance Underwriting, Risk Management, Risk Scoring

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Welcome to The Risks of Hazard, brought to you by Intermap Technologies®. From the latest industry news and trends, to insight from thought leaders around the globe, stay tuned for a variety of content aimed at helping you better understand the role of location-based intelligence in the world of insurance underwriting and risk assessment.

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