The insurance industry has been using statistical models to provide guidance towards data-driven decision-making for many years.
Life insurance companies have mortality tables going back a century or more, allowing actuaries to determine rates for today's life insurance customers that will maintain future profitability while fulfilling the promises made in the policies.
The explosion of computer technology in the last 50 years has created opportunities for data gathering and analysis that could only be dreamed of even a generation ago. Insurers now have the ability to sift through mountains of data to help derive useful insights and estimate the potential impact of a variety of possible future events.
|Earthquake activity
The invention of the seismograph in the early 20th century provided scientists and later insurers with hard data about earthquakes as they happened. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was established in 1879, the bill authorizing its creation signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Their initial mandate was to improve topological mapping of the United States. In the 138 years since their creation, the USGS has developed high-resolution maps of nearly the entire country, and provided detailed information about landslide potential, liquefaction susceptibility and soil conditions (along with numerous other types of data).
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