People named Mohammed apparently pay more for car insurance

Caporegime
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What percentage of people with the name mohammed have their driving licenses from outside of the UK?

Probably not many. You can only drive on a foreign licence for up to 12 months and then (if outside the EEA or a citizen of a reciprocal country*) would need to pass a driving test to get one.

You can't just come from the middle east (for example) and get a UK licence without first passing the standard driving test.


*The list of countries with which Britain has reciprocal agreements includes: Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland and Zimbabwe.
https://www.expatica.com/uk/moving-to/Exchanging-your-drivers-licence-in-the-UK_107710.html
 
Soldato
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The data wont be based on anything discriminatory at all, it will be hard raw data.

Hard raw data that’s fed into an algorithm written by a human being. A human being with biases, both conscious and subconscious.

Data is nothing without interpretation.
 
Soldato
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This isn't the first time something like this has happened:
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...ay-ethnic-penalty-car-insurance-report-claims

I would be very curious to know what sort of feature engineering went on at the insurers listed in the OP. As for the algorithms having some sort of bias, I disagree, however it is possible for human bias to be introduced into the data that the algorithm will 'learn from'. Either way, I think the wally that insisted on incorporating names as a rating factor should perhaps carry out a more in-depth analysis into the potential causal relationship between the two.

The logic might have been <take name> --> <classify ethnicity and/or religion> --> <use ethnicity and/or religion as a way to rate policyholder> ---> adjust premium upwards/downards... At least that way it's less obvious you are discriminating against them. I don't suppose anybody has tried names such as Hussain, Islam, Safwan etc to see if they get inflated premiums?
 
Sgarrista
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Hard raw data that’s fed into an algorithm written by a human being. A human being with biases, both conscious and subconscious.

:rolleyes:

Im sure when they programmed it, they said, look at name vs accident rate oh, and dont forget if named mohammed add 10% because discrimination?

Really?
 
Soldato
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There’s been some research into whether the algorithms used around us exhibit bias and the conclusion is a clear ‘yes’.

I just read the article and two of the articles it references around gender biased nlp and teacher ranking, both of which heavily point to the data and not the algorithm. Of course models can be tuned to exhibit some sort of bias but the very generic algorithms off which a lot of machine learning is based aren't biased at all. In fact, how could you even go about adding a bias to say, an SVM?

On the other hand, it would be very easy for me to manipulate my dataset whereby I increase all occurrences of claims by people called Muhammed by 30% and artificially increase the settlement value of these claims by 400%.

GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.
 
Soldato
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Hard raw data that’s fed into an algorithm written by a human being. A human being with biases, both conscious and subconscious.

Data is nothing without interpretation.
Wow, so a single human being wrote the whole algo for all these insurance companies? They must be hella busy working in between EDL marches and the like.
 
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Soldato
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Campaign for free insurance for all Muslims, we must not allow this ministry group to financially victimised.


Can I change my legal name to Mohamed to get cheaper insurance, if we are successful?
 

NVP

NVP

Soldato
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As a person who has grown up with an Indian name I can say we've all known this to be the case since we first started driving. It's the way of the world (of insurance).
 
Soldato
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Data is nothing without interpretation.

But Insco's dont CARE about why Mohamed has a higher risk, they dont care why somebody involved in a non-fault accident has a higher risk either. All they care about is that they are, and charge accordingly.

I imagine Inscos have all sorts of data sets that are really pretty controversial, whether they use them all or not I dont know, but I would be fascinated to see them...
 
Caporegime
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Just slightly changing your job title can change your premium by £1000 anyway.
True. Not £1000, but when my brother qualified as a gas engineer, removing the apprentice from his job title dropped his premium by £200. I can only assume apprentices have more accidents and are viewed as younger and higher risk than fully qualified people.
 
Soldato
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So the possibility that it's perfectly good data with a solid statistical background isn't a possibility then? Or probability for that matter?

The point I’m making is that it’s a fallacy to believe that anything based on “raw hard data” is free from human error and bias.
 
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