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Google Street View image of a house predicts car accident risk of its resident
- jetaim 7y agoOne point that confuses me a bit: The study initially used experts (no word on the experts?) and later only selects four experts for the subsample because their kappa is moderate. Is that a common approach? If there are two raters in a sample of six that disagree with the four others, I would argue that the IRR is an issue. Otherwise one could always run studies with n experts and only select a subsample of those raters that have a high interrater agreement, or not? The Fleiss kappas are already relatively low..
- londons_explore 7y agoIt doesn't impact the validity of the results of the study as far as I can see... If they got closer to a perfect rating system, the predictive power of the model could only be better.
- topmonk 7y agoFYI, they didn't use AI to do this, just a team of unpaid college interns to annotate the images.
- papayawhip 7y agono, it doesn’t
- jdavis703 7y agoThe authors acknowledge that house “quality” could be encoding other biases such as race, religion or class. It would have been great if the authors explored this a bit more. How closely did insurance risk correlate with the demographics they mentioned?
- joosters 7y agoHow would they obtain this information? The car insurance company (presumably) didn't have it, so the researchers would have to get in touch with each individual in their dataset and have an awkward conversation along the lines of "we're working with your car insurer, please tell us your race and religion". That's not going to go down very well...
- jdavis703 7y agoThey could use census block information. That’s generally higher resolution than zip code data.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago"... the average improvement of the Gini coefficient is nearly 2 percentage points (from 38.2% to 40.1%)." Break out the champagne!
- tropo 7y agoFinancial situation affects both house appearance and insurance claims. Some people won't bother to file legitimate insurance claims for small things, while other people will file fraudulent claims. House appearance and car crashes will be related by risk-taking behavior, carelessness, and being too tired. For almost any two things in life, an inability to keep one in good order will most likely predict the other.
- dehrmann 7y agoInterestingly, the guy who rear ended me was in a 30-year-old pickup and had a suspended license.
- interfixus 7y agoInterestingly, I drive old, cheap, used cars, and have a professionel license for every imaginable kind of vehicle under the sun. Also, I live in a somewhat decrepit house from around 1890, in a postcode area of no prestige whatsoever. In 40 years of driving, I have not been in any collision, and have never filed an insurance claim.
- altacc 7y agoThe view from within an insurance company: insurance fraud occurs across the spectra of socioeconomic statuses. Whether people file a small claim or make a fraudulent claim is driven mostly by their personality. Often those with more feel entitled to get more back from a claim. The difference a claimant's personal situation & qualities makes to the claim is often via prejudices of the claims adjuster. Which is why we implement automated fraud detection to help identify those who otherwise appear "honest".
- riffic 7y agocrash, not accident. people make decisions that drive outcomes into occurring, either behind the wheel or in the design of road infrastructure.
- jl2718 7y agoThey may be trolling, but it’s a pretty good example of statistical naïveté. What I mean by that is ignoring conditional independence even when it is obvious from common sense. Common sense tells us that living in an old house does not ‘cause’ car accidents, but it also tells us that a poor working elderly person may have a higher risk of both car accidents, and living in an old house. The dependence between the effects disappears when conditioned upon observations closer to the chain of causality.
- baroffoos 7y agoThis also makes me wonder if they house had any relevance at all other than a publicly available show of approximate income. If the researchers had access to all of the incomes of the people they researched would they have been able to build the exact same predictions or were more factors involved like rural/inner city drivers having different results.
- jl2718 7y agoThat's kind of my point. Conditioned upon the right set of variables, they could have probably come up with the opposite 'prediction'.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoFinish reading the abstract and you'll see there's nothing naive about their analysis.
- akdor1154 7y agoThey don't claim the effect is independent at all, they claim that an insurance company can decide to not bother collecting correct data about the actual causative variables, and instead just base their model off a picture of your house on GSV.
- zo1 7y agoAll good and well, but as far as I know, certain laws are in place that prevent insurance companies from actually using indicators that are "closer to the chain of causality". E.g. poor, elderly (an now recently, male/female). It's then no surprise that they're then actually trying to find other means of determining risk factors for individuals.
- jl6 7y agoInsurers kind of already take advantage of this correlation, by rating policies according to the postcode/zipcode of the policyholder. The usual explanation is that some areas have busier roads and busier roads are conducive to more accidents. But busier roads also usually correlate with urban density which often correlates with socioeconomic status, race, crime, ...
- sterlind 7y agoEerily similar to the practice of Banks red-lining districts they wouldn't sell loans or mortgages to. Legally, this is a sort of "differential impact" discrimination, and iirc it's mostly legal as long as you can justify your reasoning. I think insurers would have to justify their rate adjustments though - a 5% extra premium for comprehensive at the intersection of Skid Row and Mugger's Bend is probably legit, but a 300% extra in Chinatown would land the insurer in legal hot water. Trial lawyers make big money running class-actions for these sorts of things, which hopefully keeps businesses honest. (IANAL, I picked this up from my mom who does labor/employment defense.)
- hrktb 7y agoThis is a circle that is going on for very long I think. People with private locked garage will also have better ratings in general. Wealthier places will also invest more in road maintenance and limiting accident factors (for instance having a ton more protective equipment near school zones, investing in underground parking near shopping areas etc.) In general I feel that trying to legally screen info from insurance is a lost proposition, as they have all the data in the world and find a proxy for that info anyway.
- akakakak 7y agoMy car insurance offers a small tracking device to estimate if you're a risky driver. It got GPS, acceleration sensors and Bluetooth to transmit the data over your smartphone. I registered for the beta and like it a lot. I'm paying 30% less with no effort - just because I'm not driving as crazy as everyone else. at least on paper, data protection is fine - is being processed by a separate company with a very restrictive privacy agreement, storing and handing over only a 1-10 integer for several driving skills (speeding, acceleration, hard breaking).
- spicyramen 7y agoWhich company?
- akakakak 7y agoHUK; a German company
- carstenhag 7y agoI did this with CosmosDirekt back when I still had a car. 40% cheaper than the usual contract. I was rated as the best 2% of the app users. I had to drive 400km to get a score. Of course, I drove like my grandma was about to have a neck operation to get that score.
- netsharc 7y agoI've seen ads for it in the UK: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/how-does-black-box-insurance-work/ https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/how-does-blac... It'd be cool (from a hacker point of view) to spoof the smartphone's GPS/accelerometer data: put a delay of, say 10 seconds. So you can accelerate like mad off the red light, but the blackbox app receives a spoofed acceleration curve which is gentler. I guess it's harder if you like going over the speed limit, e.g. you'd arrive to your destination after driving 90 mph, but the app still has to spoof you being 20 miles away doing 70mph (the highway limit in the UK).
- Symmetry 7y agoThat seems pretty unobjectionable to me. It's generally good that insurance companies encourage people to behave in ways that result in fewer payouts. Car insurance companies encouraging people to drive in a safer manner, health insurance companies encouraging you to go to the gym, fire insurance companies encouraging sprinkler systems, etc.
- Freak_NL 7y agoYou can have Google blur your house on Street View if you are so inclined. No idea in what kind of insurance profile bucket that will shunt you, but it's something to consider for the privacy conscious among us. Click on 'report a problem' in Street View and centre the viewer you will see on your house, select 'my home' from the options, and add the address for good measure in the comment area.
- akakakak 7y agoThere's far too many blurred houses on Google Maps in Germany, often because a single tenant opted-out. It's the 21st century equivalent of hiding under the blanket to protect from the evil spirits.
- paggle 7y agoNo, it’s the 21st century reality of needing to protect yourself from insurance companies looking to spy on your house to set your insurance rates.
- zmzrr 7y agoLiterally hiding under a blanket: the day blurring out houses becomes widespread, they will just sent a human to look at your house.
- akakakak 7y agoOr use a data provider that doesn't allow opt-out and has no publicly available interface.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoGood. That imposes a cost on whoever wants to look at someone's house and provides a disincentive to do it without a good reason.
- paggle 7y agoThat’s totally fine. They’ve been able to do that for 200 years and it hasn’t proved worth the cost.
- bb123 7y agoI really don't like this trend of considering every facet of my life when making an insurance offer. All these systems seem to lack the nuance to take into account personal circumstances. What if I bought a "bad" condition house as a fixer-upper? Does that mean I'm a bad driver?
- Filligree 7y agoOn average yes, because it doesn't consider that facet of your life. You can't have it both ways, I suppose. I generally agree. The whole point of insurance is to pool risk -- so cutting the population into ever-smaller pools seems missing the point. In the infinite limit we'd get seven billion single-person pools, each of which has that person pay in the exact same amount of money they get back out. This is also known as "not having insurance".
- unpopular42 7y agoQuite the opposite. The point of insurance is to replace a high variance distribution of potential losses with a low variance distribution, but with a similar expected loss. In other words, on average you pay a bit more, but you never pay a huge amount. Now, in a perfect world, everyone would pay exactly what their expected loss is, plus a small premium. Since it's impossible to measure the expected loss exactly, in reality some people pay a bit more and some pay a bit less. Getting a better risk estimate doesn't get you closer to "not having insurance", but rather closer to "perfect insurance" where everyone gets a distribution that exactly matches their risk profile.
- lngnmn1 7y agoWhat does it even mean? No accident happened it up to now means that the time is yet to come or that "prediction" is just bullshit?
- jswizzy 7y agoSeems like a good way to legally discriminate against the poor and minorities. /s
- buboard 7y ago> could be used for price discrimination Would it be better if the insurance agents visited the house themselves?
- hacker_111 7y agoVvv
- nabla9 7y agoThis is why privacy and regulating information asymmetries is so important. Consider ML model that picks 1,000 people for every 10,000 and 99% of those selected are false positives. Insurance fee is $100 and average payment is $50,000. Rejecting those 1,000 people is $100,000 less revenue and saving $500,000 in payments. It's no brainier to reject people and let there be statistical accidents. Insurance companies can make profit using models that have huge number of false positives. If your insurance company or bank is allowed to use all data it collects to make model of you, it leads to Kafkaesque world. "Why my insurance premium jumped 200% and I can't afford it anymore?" Nobody knows that the reason is your dried out flower in garage widow visible to the street. "Why I can't get mortgage?" You have too many Facebook friends with risk of defaulting and one has criminal record. Select your friends better.
- londons_explore 7y agoWill you lend me $1k? Probably not - you don't even know me. Would you lend a close friend $1k? Maybe, if they really needed it. This is an example of you discriminating based on what you know about me/them. Should such discrimination be made illegal?
- shkkmo 7y agoMaking such "friend-to-friend" lending a major part of the financing infrastructure in the US, it would clearly lead to strong economic and racial disparities. You don't have to make that kind of stuff illegal, but you also need to make sure that you don't base important parts of your economic systems on such biased processes.
- tclancy 7y agoOne has nothing to do with the other. A corporation has no friends.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoIf you stop insurance companies assessing risk then there will be no insurance industry.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoWhere's the app? How does my house rate?
- stevespang 7y agoIn other words, an image of my house shows run down, no paint, 3 trucks in the driveway - - - highest accident risk ? But with health insurance, I am a vegetarian for more than 40 years, swim 4500 yards a week for 30+ years, 176 Lbs at 5'10" height, yet I have to pay relatively the same health premiums per age as the fat slobs that eat at fast food every meal . . . in effect I am paying extra for their increased medical needs . . .
- twothamendment 7y agoInsurance will use whatever data they can get in an attempt to be more accurate. My address is plagued by a fire risk map. Companies will insure my neighbor, but not me. At some point a person or machine drew a live on a map and I crossed it. A firefighter looked this location and concluded that if either house burns they will both likely burn. If the insurance companies believed him would they cover me or drop my neighbor? It is a crazy industry. Vegas anyone?
- everybodyknows 7y ago>age, type, and condition In US, home insurance companies already have such info in detail. Most also sell auto coverage. State regulators might require a "Chinese wall" between the two operations, but effective enforcement would be another matter.