2021 Mortality Forecasting Contest

09-09-2021

Purdue Actuarial Science students Shuxian (Alex) Ning and Shuyu Zhu won the Second Place Prize in the 2021 Mortality Forecasting Contest organized by the Society of Actuaries (SOA), the world’s largest Actuarial professional organization.

The contest was open to all entries including from undergraduate/graduate students, academic researchers, and practicing actuaries. The contestants were asked to apply cutting-edge Data Science techniques to model and predict the life insurance industry mortality rates based on a large-scale mortality data set. The winning submissions were judged based on creativity, originality, practical significance, prediction accuracy, and overall submission quality.

Ning and Zhu would like to acknowledge the financial support from the College of Science via the 2021 Ruzicka Research Scholarship as well as the mentorship by Assistant Professor, Mengyi Xu.

Purdue Actuarial Science is a degree-granting program that is jointly administered by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics. We encourage all students from any disciplines who are interested in Actuarial Science to contact one of our Actuarial faculty for further information or research opportunities. More information about Purdue Actuarial Science can be also found in https://www.math.purdue.edu/academic/actuary/index.html

Congratulations to Alex and Shuyu!