Fit-for-All Prophet Model - Not a Good Idea

After completing the debugging on Prophet model yesterday, I still think that building a #Prophet model that aims to fit-for-all (e.g., business units) is NOT A GOOD IDEA.

Yesterday my team member, Cang Zheng, and I were assisting one of our Prophet users in debugging her reserve figure generated from their existing Prophet production model (which was developed earlier by other modelers). When we went through the Prophet model, although it was not modified from the standard Conventional library, we still found traces that it is modified from a library that aims to achieve fit-for-all purposes.

How did we find the traces? In fact, it is not something difficult - such Prophet library usually contains substantial redundancy, as well as longer route to trace the calculations - also many rules to control the calculations. In addition, the formatting used in coding is inconsistent, which is clearly not from a standard library.

Having a fit-for-all Prophet model is indeed ambitious, but in my view, it is less practical. As I also share with my team members, FLEXIBILITY always come with COMPLEXITY - more flexibility, more complexity. When we want to build a fit-for-all Prophet model (i.e., FLEXIBLE for many business units), we can't avoid of making the Prophet model more COMPLEX. This also increases the hurdles in using the Prophet model - i.e., the users need to have more technical knowledge in understanding the Prophet model. But in reality, we definitely can't expect all actuarial valuation users to have good technical knowledge in Prophet.

It is IMPORTANT to note that the persons who going to USE Prophet models are valuation users, and NOT Prophet modelers.

That's the reason when we assist our clients in setting up Prophet models, we will usually first understand their level of Prophet knowledge.

(Source of Image: Gemini AI)

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