A Class of Mixture of Experts Models for General Insurance : Application to Correlated Claim Frequencies

This paper focuses on the estimation and application aspects of the Erlang Count Logit-weighted Reduced Mixture of Experts model (EC-LRMoE), which is a fully flexible multivariate insurance claim frequency regression model proposed in Fung et al. (2018a). We first prove the identifiability property of the proposed model to ensure that it is a suitable candidate for statistical inference. An Expectation-Conditional-Maximization (ECM) algorithm is developed for efficient model calibrations. Three simulation studies are performed so that the effectiveness of the proposed ECM algorithm and the versatility of the proposed model can be examined. The applicability of the EC-LRMoE is shown through fitting an European automobile insurance dataset. Since the dataset contains several complex features, we find it necessary to adopt such a flexible model. Apart from showing excellent fitting results, we are able to interpret the fitted model in an insurance perspective and to visualize the relationship between policyholders' information and their risk level. Finally, we demonstrate how the fitted model may be useful for insurance ratemaking