Insurance Trends vs. Paper Clips Analytics
The analysis of most insurance trends involves many innocuous spreadsheets that only gives the reader headaches. I was looking over an old article today concerning a NCPRIMA presentation from 2014.
BTW, we are upgrading every article on this website to make it Google searchable and rankable. That task has taken over 6 months as we have over 1,620 articles to upgrade. It is ongoing. Whew!
I digress – one of my old bosses always said do not analyze paper clips. You have people to do that for you. Analyze the big trends to see the direction your organization is heading (to and fro). Many of the groups to which he was presenting consisted of a large number of financial types (CFO, Financial Officer, etc.).
The financial types – I guess I am one – would squirm in their seats when he would say – Analyze trends not paper clips. Insurance trends are very similar.
I have pointed out many times in presentations and in the articles that Excel(R) is your best friend when analyzing trends. In fact Microsoft has provided Statistical Analysis packs for Excel. This is one of the best bargains in the analysis world.
If you are looking for a more economical (free) data analyses pack, you can try the OpenOffice by Apache installation that is a good analysis pack. The work you do must be personal and not business for the OpenOffice packs. You may want to throw a few dollars their way as the software is a treasure for non-business analysis.
Correction – According to Apache
“You may use it on home machines, in the office, with your small business, school, church, gardening club, etc.”
The ones I use are Regression, Stepwise Regression, Coefficient of Correlation, Z-test, T-test, F-test, Chi-Square, and Regression Graphs. I use regression often as I like to use more historical data than most insurance actuaries. Business cycles and insurance trends are 20 year – not 10 or less.
Google has long recognized long-tailed data for their keywords. Regression is a long-tailed analysis.
Analyzing insurance trends can be tedious at first. Once you set up a framework for analysis – depending on what you are analyzing – the task can become simple to a point.
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2 Responses
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