Insurance fraud is a constantly moving target. It's hard to keep up with the perpetrators' latest ways. Given the thin margins in P&C insurance, a first line of defense is detecting fraudulent claims.

There are a number of new and effective ways for the industry to fight fraud. Because the P&C industry has so many product lines and data is often stored in silos, P&C in particular is a prime candidate for examining data in a new way, to analyze and uncover potential fraud that could have otherwise been missed using a conventional approach.

Graph theory: A new method

Graph theory is a cutting-edge analytics methodology that compresses analytics efforts to pinpoint hidden networks, leading to better outcomes — such as finding that needle in a haystack, or connecting together two seemingly unrelated data points to uncover the anomaly that warns, "fraudulent claim."