Genworth Financial Assigned Patent

By Targeted News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 4 -- Genworth Financial, Richmond, Va., has been assigned a patent (8,214,314) developed by six co-inventors for a "system and process for a fusion classification for insurance underwriting suitable for use by an automated system." The co-inventors are Piero Patrone Bonissone, Schenectady, N.Y., Kareem Sherif Aggour, Niskayuna, N.Y., Rajesh Venkat Subbu, Troy, N.Y., Weizhong Yan, Clifton Park, N.Y., Naresh Sundaram Iyer, Clifton Park, N.Y., and Anindya Chakraborty, Schenectady, N.Y.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A method and system for fusing a collection of classifiers used for an automated insurance underwriting system and/or its quality assurance is described. Specifically, the outputs of a collection of classifiers are fused. The fusion of the data will typically result in some amount of consensus and some amount of conflict among the classifiers. The consensus will be measured and used to estimate a degree of confidence in the fused decisions. Based on the decision and degree of confidence of the fusion and the decision and degree of confidence of the production decision engine, a comparison module may then be used to identify cases for audit, cases for augmenting the training/test sets for re-tuning production decision engine, cases for review, or may simply trigger a record of its occurrence for tracking purposes. The fusion can compensate for the potential correlation among the classifiers. The reliability of each classifier can be represented by a static or dynamic discounting factor, which will reflect the expected accuracy of the classifier. A static discounting factor is used to represent a prior expectation about the classifier's reliability, e.g., it might be based on the average past accuracy of the model, while a dynamic discounting is used to represent a conditional assessment of the classifier's reliability, e.g., whenever a classifier bases its output on an insufficient number of points it is not reliable."

The patent application was filed on June 2, 2008 (12/131,545). The full-text of the patent can be found at http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,214,314.PN.&OS=PN/8,214,314&RS=PN/8,214,314

Written by Shabnam Sheikh; edited by Jaya Anand.

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