Data Science Working Group: Excel: an old dog learns new tricks

Speaker
Giacomo Maugeri, FIA CERA

Session Title
Excel: an old dog learns new tricks

Session Description
Excel has been the crux and delight of the actuarial profession for the last 30 years, and the absolute nemesis of most data scientists. In the last 5 years a new set of functions have been added to Excel that significantly extend its capabilities. In this session you will discover a new world beyond cell references, LOOKUPs and INDEX.

Session Structure

• Theoretical introduction - covering the fundamental concepts showcased in the session: spreadsheet software, programming language, Turing completeness, lambda calculus, functional programming and relational algebra.
• Live Excel functions showcase - simple examples of RANDARRAY, VSTACK, TAKE, LAMBDA, FILTER, BYROW, BYCOLUMN, MAKEARRAY, LET and explicit recursion.
• Actuarial example - XoL reinsurance pricing with distribution fitting and stochastic simulation. 
• Concluding remarks - How do Excel’s syntax and speed compare with Python, R and Julia; pushing Excel to its limits, GPT-2 inference in pure Excel, current limitations of Excel and new upcoming features

Speaker Bio
Giacomo is a FIA & CERA freelance actuary based in Switzerland focusing on holistic risk modelling, AI automation and data-driven decision making. He has a long story as an actuarial trainer, starting from his role at Ultimate Risk Solutions, where he was in charge of running EMEA actuarial software training on reinsurance pricing, Solvency II, IFRS17 and reserving, to his last role as head of EY Malta actuarial services, where he held internal seminars and presented at the EAA e-conference on Data Science & Data Ethics. Giacomo holds an MSc in Actuarial Science from Bayes Business School (formerly known as Cass) and is an experienced modeller covering personal lines predictive modeling and pricing optimisation, reinsurance structuring, capital modelling and individual reserving. As a volunteer member of the IFoA Programming for Actuarial Work working party he wrote the chapter on algorithms for the e-book An Introductory Guide to programming.