Health and care – Techniques in Data Science in Health and Care Working Party – members

Application closing date: 16 June

The IFoA is seeking to appoint both members and suitably experienced non-members to join this recently launched working party.

Background

This is an important topic in terms of promoting appropriate data science techniques on data available to actuaries either within their own firms and from external sources.

The research should create a framework to assist health and care actuaries in what techniques are appropriate for their project:

• Business question / objective to address
• Overview of traditional actuarial techniques crossing over with data science and limitations to these techniques
• Using / adopting data science techniques to complement / enrich actuarial techniques or problems 

• • Data selection: Assessment of data to understand if it will address the business question. To understand the quality of the data and suitable techniques to clean the data: for example, missingness and inconsistencies etc
  • Data exploration: to understand the data by using visualisation techniques
  • Modelling: with a focus on the business objective and to select a technique that is appropriate: for example, credibility of data, transparency

• Communication, including interpretability of models
• Regulations / ethics

To illustrate the framework, the research will provide specific example(s) of different tasks a health and care actuary may encounter along with pros/cons of the different approaches for each of these specific cases with guidance for when it’s appropriate to use them: for example, where data has limited credibility it may be more appropriate to use a regression technique rather than a more sophisticated machine learning approach.

Skills/expertise

Actuaries, data scientists, modellers, or users of health and care data. Academic members, epidemiologists, and medical statisticians could add to the perspective of best practices in health data science and modelling.

To read more about the working party, see its terms of reference (PDF, 270 KB)

Time commitment

The time commitment varies but will not be more than a maximum of 10 hours per month.

Fortnightly virtual meetings (30 to 60 minutes). There is no requirement to meet in person in any particular location.

Next steps

If you are interested in this role but would like an informal conversation before applying, please email us at engagement.team@actuaries.org.uk.

If you have read all the above and would like to apply, please send us:

• brief details of your relevant experience
• your reasons for wishing to get involved
• your ARN (if you are a member)
• a brief copy of your CV and full contact details (if you are a non-member)
• confirmation that you have read, understood, and agree to the information and requirements laid out in our volunteer information pack (please be aware that until we have received this confirmation, we will not be able to appoint you as a volunteer)

Please email all the above to engagement.team@actuaries.org.uk. Please note, we are unable to accept late applications.

We are committed to promoting diversity, equality of opportunity, and inclusion, within all our vacancies and we actively encourage applications from a diverse range of potential candidates. Recognising and embracing the unique and diverse talents of our volunteers is fundamental to the success of our organisation.

What you need to know

Volunteering provides you with a wide range of opportunities. With all rights and opportunities come responsibilities and we ask all our volunteers to comply with the terms of the IFoA’s governance manual and volunteer information pack. Before offering to provide support, please read through: what you need to know.