My Expertise
Ethical Insurance Pricing, Insurance Data Science
Keywords
Fields of Research (FoR)
Insurance studies, Investment and risk management, Statistical data science, Marketing Management (incl. Strategy and Customer Relations), Business EthicsSEO tags
Biography
Fei Huang is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuaries Studies and Lead - Data and AI Tech of UNSW Business AI Lab. She received her BSc. in Mathematics from Xiamen University, MPhil in Actuarial Science from the University of Hong Kong, and PhD in Actuarial Studies from the Australian National University. Before joining UNSW in July 2020, she was a senior lecturer at the Australian National University. Fei is a columnist...view more
Fei Huang is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuaries Studies and Lead - Data and AI Tech of UNSW Business AI Lab. She received her BSc. in Mathematics from Xiamen University, MPhil in Actuarial Science from the University of Hong Kong, and PhD in Actuarial Studies from the Australian National University. Before joining UNSW in July 2020, she was a senior lecturer at the Australian National University. Fei is a columnist writing Responsible Data Science series for Actuaries Digital - Actuaries Institute Magazine. She has received more than ten awards for research and educational excellence since 2017, recognising her contributions to actuarial science, data science, and responsible AI.
Fei’s research focuses on responsible AI and data-driven decision-making, with particular emphasis on insurance, risk management, and actuarial applications. She draws on tools from statistics, machine learning, economics, and marketing to design solutions that are not only accurate and interpretable, but also fair, stable, and privacy-preserving. A central aim of her work is to ensure that insurance and superannuation (retirement income products) remain equitable, affordable, and sustainable in the face of advancing AI and a changing climate. Her recent research spans three key areas:
- Responsible AI: advancing understanding and quantitative adoption of key principles, especially in the insurance and superannuation industries, including accuracy, fairness, interpretability, uncertainty quantification, privacy, and stability, to ensure trustworthy and ethical data-driven decision making. Her research on antidiscrimination insurance pricing has received several prestigious awards from both academia and professional bodies, including the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Award for Innovation and Excellence in Research (Emerging and Applied).
- Climate disaster insurance: tackling challenges related to affordability, sustainability, and fairness in climate disaster insurance policy and design. This work is funded by an ARC Discovery Project "Dealing with Climate disasters" (2025-2028).
- Mortality and retirement income: examining socio-economic mortality differentials and their implications for retirement income and annuity systems. She led the development of the interactive dashboard Australian Longevity Explorer and open-access Australian Socio-Economic Longevity Dataverse to help Australians, industry, and government better understand longevity patterns, using linked individual-level national datasets.
Her work has been published in leading actuarial journals and received several prestigious research awards, including the National Industry PhD Program Award, ABDC Innovation and Excellence Award for Research (Emerging Applied Category), Carol Dolan Actuaries Summit Prize, Amecian Academy of Actuaries' Award for Research, ASTIN Colloquium Best Paper Award, the Actuaries Institute's Volunteer of the Year Award in the Spirit of Volunteering category, and the UNSW Business School SDG Research Impact Award. Her research has been funded by multiple international and domestic institutions, including the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project), the Society of Actuaries, and Milliman.
Fei teaches actuarial data science and statistical machine learning at UNSW. By collaborating with industry partners, she incorporates contemporary industry challenges into the course syllabus to offer a unique industry-engaging experience for students. Her educational excellence has been recognised by winning the UNSW John Prescott Award for Outstanding Teaching Innovation (2022), the ANU Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the Early Career Category (2018) and the ANU College of Business and Economics Award for Teaching Excellence in the Early Career Category (2017). Fei is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA).
Fei works with insurers, consulting firms, and government agencies for transformative research and education projects, covering a wide range of topics. Examples of such collaborations include mortality modelling, fairness metrics for life insurance, Interpretable and fair insurance pricing using causal models, personalised customer management, bushfire risk modelling, multi-coverage bundled insurance pricing, claims inflation forecasting, and property insurance pricing with high-cardinality features.
My Grants
- Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, Dealing with Climate Disasters (with Jeremy Moss), 2025-2027, $439,488
- National Industry PhD Program Award, Industry Researcher PhD category (for Laura Zhao), 2024-2032, $232,000 (max from government to support the project)
- Fairness Metrics for Life Insurance (with Milliman), SOA Research Grant, 2023, US$30,000
My Qualifications
- Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA)
- PhD, Australian National University
- MPhil, University of Hong Kong
- BSc, Xiamen University
My Awards
Research Awards
- American Academy of Actuaries' Academy Award for Research, Recipient: Xi Xin (PhD student), for co-authored paper "Antidiscrimination Insurance Pricing: Regulations, Fairness Criteria, and Models". 2025
- Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Award for Innovation and Excellence in Research (Emerging and Applied), with PhD student Xi Xin as a team member, 2024
- National Industry PhD Program Award, with Zurich Cover-More, Industry PhD candidate Laura Zhao, 2024
- SOA CKER and CAS Individual Grant Competition Awardee, 2024
- UNSW Business School SDG Research Impact Award, 2023
- Actuaries Institute's Volunteer of the Year Award - Spirit of Volunteering, 2023
- ASTIN Colloquium Best Paper Award, 2022
- Carol Dolan Actuaries Summit Prize, 2022
Education Awards
- Bloomberg Education Excellence Award - Best Innovative Teaching Practice (with Kevin Liu, Xiao Xu, Jonathan Ziveyi, and Sherry Zhang), 2023
- UNSW John Prescott Award for Outstanding Teaching Innovation, 2022
- ANU Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the Early Career Category, 2018
- ANU College of Business and Economics Award for Teaching Excellence in the Early Career Category, 2017
My Research Activities
- Climate Disaster Insurance - ARC Discovery Project (2025-2028) Dealing with Climate Disasters with Jeremy Moss
- Responsible AI -- Fairness and Discrimination in insurance pricing
(1) The Discriminating (Pricing) Actuary (with Edward (Jed) Frees), NAAJ, 2023
(2) Anti-discrimination Insurance Pricing: Regulations, Fairness Criteria, and Models (with Xi Xin), NAAJ, 2024
This paper won the inaugural Carol Dolan Actuaries Summit Prize, ASTIN Colloquium Best Paper Award, and American Academy of Actuaries' Academy Award for Research.
(3) Welfare Implications of Fair and Accountable Insurance Pricing (with Hajime Shimao), 2024 (SSRN version)
(4) Welfare Implications of Fairness Regulations in Insurance Cost Modeling: A Multi-Method Study (with Hajime Shimao and Warut Khern-am-nuai), 2025 (SSRN version)
(5) Learning Fair Decisions with Factor Models: Applications to Annuity Pricing (with Junhao Shen, Yanrong Yang, and Ran Zhao), 2025 (arXiv version)
(6) Marginal Fairness: Fair Decision-Making under Risk Measures (with Silvana M. Pesenti), 2025 (SSRN version / arXiv version) - Responsible AI -- Transparency and Interpretability
(1) Why You Should Not Trust Interpretations in Machine Learning. (with Xi Xin and Giles Hooker) (arXiv version) - Mortality and Retirement Income -- Socio-economic Longevity Differentials
(1) Towards Fairer Retirement Outcomes: Socio-economic Mortality Differentials in Australia (with Francis Hui and Andres Villegas) (SSRN version / Australian Socio-Economic Mortality Dataverse /Australian Longevity Explorer ) - Mortality and Retirement Income -- Advanced-age mortality modelling
(1) Modelling life tables with advanced ages: An extreme value theory approach (with Ross Maller and Ning Xu), Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, 2020 - Customer Churn Analysis and Customer Management
(1) Multi-State Modelling of Customer Churn (with Yumo Dong, Edward (Jed) Frees, Francis Hui), ASTIN Bulletin, 2022 (SSRN version)
(2) A Joint Model of Cost and Churn for Stochastic Cost Industries (with Yumo Dong, Edward (Jed) Frees, Francis Hui, and Harald Van Heerde) (SSRN version)
Software Packages
STLT: STLT fits the Smooth Threshold Life Table (STLT) and Dynamic Smooth Threshold Life Table (DSTLT) as outlined in Modelling life tables with advanced ages: An extreme value theory approach. It also provides S3 methods for predicting using fitted STLT and DSTLT models, as well as plotting the fitted lines.
Open Dataset
Australian Socio-Economic Mortality Dataverse
Online Interactive App
Australian Longevity Explorer: Understanding Australian Socio-Economic Longevity and its Retirement Income Implications
My Research Supervision
Supervision keywords
Areas of supervision
- Responsible Data-driven Decision Making
* Insurance discrimination and pricing fairness
* Algorithmic bias mitigation
* Interpretable machine learning
* Mortality modelling - Customer Relationship Management
* Pricing
* Customer Retention
* Customer Lifetime Value
Currently supervising
- Laura Zhao (primary supervisor), part-time PhD student at UNSW Sydney, National Industry PhD Program
- Xi Xin (primary supervisor), PhD student at UNSW Sydney
- Yumo Dong (primary supervisor), PhD student at the Australian National University, graduated.
My Engagement
Media Coverage:
- Actuaries Digital, 2025, When Students Become Startups
- Business Think, 2025, How socio-economic factors drive significant life expectancy gaps
- The Actuary Magazine (IFoA), 2025, Check your AI: a framework for its use in actuarial practice
- Actuaries Digital, Responsible Data Science column, 2025, The Price of Loyalty: Rethinking Optimisation in Insurance Pricing
- Actuaries Digital, Responsible Data Science column, 2025, Achieving Fairness in Data-driven Decision Making
- Featured in a special print magazine edition of BusinessThink to celebrate UNSW Sydney’s 75th anniversary, 2024
- Forbes Advisor, 2024, How Much Is Home And Contents Insurance In Australia?
- Business Think. 2024, Beyond black box AI: Pitfalls in machine learning interpretability.
- Info360, 2024, This is why your insurance premiums keep going up. (republished by 75 news medias, and ‘audience reach’ of about 500,624. )
- RESOLVE, December 2023, AI discrimination potential explored, by Resolve Editor Kate Tilley, Australian Insurance Law Association (AILA)
- Business Think, 2023. If you get a genetic test, could a life insurance firm use it against you?
- Business Think, 2023. Home insurance is on the rise. Is there an affordable solution?
- ANZIIF article 2023: How to manage bias in insurance data and algorithms.
- Actuaries Digital 2023: The 2023 Volunteer of the Year Winners Announced!
- Business Think and UNSW Newsroom , 2022, Pricing fairness: tackling big data and COVID-19 insurance discrimination.
- IMD and Business Think, 2022. How insurers can mitigate the discrimination risks posed by AI.
- Actuaries Digital 2022, How confident are you that your insurance pricing or underwriting models are not discriminatory?
- Huang, F., Liu, K. and Yu, J., 2022. UNSW data analytics Sandbox empowers young actuaries to help solve industry problems, Actuaries Digital
- Value Driven Data Science Podcast 2022, Episode 3: Fairness and Anti-Discrimination in Machine Learning
- SBS Radio Interview (in Chinese) 2021 on Insurance Discrimination, Link
My Teaching
- ACTL4305/5305 Actuarial Data Science Applications (2020 - now)
Datathon project (2024): Competing for Pet Insurance Customers: A Pricing Competition. Industry Partners: Fetch, Airtree, Finity. Event video; Media Coverage (When Students Becomes Starts, Actuaries Digital)
Sandbox project (2023): Understanding Bushfire Event Risk Across Australia. Industry Partner: Suncorp. Event Video
Sandbox project (2022): Multi-coverage Claim Modelling for Insurance Packaged Products. Industry Partner: IAG. Event Video
Sandbox project (2021): Develop Pricing Models for SME Building Insurnace with Features Having High Cardinality. Industry Partner: Suncorp. Media Coverage - ACTL3142/5110 Statistical Machine Learning for Risk and Insurance Applications (2021-2022)
Sandbox project (2022): Predicting Claims Inflation for Commercial Auto Insurance Pricing. Industry Partner: IAG. Event Video
Publications
ORCID as entered in ROS
