Beginner’s Roadmap to Working with Driving Behavior Data

Motivation: Usage-based auto insurance has received considerable publicity, but the driving behavior data that fuels these programs has been the subject of limited academic scrutiny. In this paper, we expose the challenges and risks that result from working with this data, and we discuss how actuaries may collect, organize, and analyze driving behaviors for use in insurance applications.

Method: In this paper, we use historical context to identify objectives, challenges, and risks in working with driving behavior data. We identify key tenets of the infrastructure required to support data collection, with a focus on vehicle telematics. We look at sample driving behavior data and how it may be organized into databases for predictive modeling and classification. We conclude with a discussion of sample use cases for the data.

Results: Driving behavior data allows insurers to achieve unique goals in pricing, underwriting, and loss control or mitigation, but it also presents unique challenges and risks.

Conclusions: Sound data management allows insurers to use driving behavior data to achieve organizational goals while rising to the challenges and risks this data presents.

Keywords: Driving behavior data; usage-based insurance; vehicle telematics; black boxes.