Why to buy insurance? An explainable artificial intelligence approach

Abstract

We propose an Explainable AI model that can be employed in order to explain why a customer buys or abandons a non-life insurance coverage. The method consists in applying similarity clustering to the Shapley values that were obtained from a highly accurate XGBoost predictive classification algorithm. Our proposed method can be embedded into a technologically-based insurance service (Insurtech), allowing to understand, in real time, the factors that most contribute to customers’ decisions, thereby gaining proactive insights on their needs. We prove the validity of our model with an empirical analysis that was conducted on data regarding purchases of insurance micro-policies. Two aspects are investigated: the propensity to buy an insurance policy and the risk of churn of an existing customer. The results from the analysis reveal that customers can be effectively and quickly grouped according to a similar set of characteristics, which can predict their buying or churn behaviour well.