March 23, 2017
The CAS Institute (iCAS) is pleased to announce that draft learning objectives for the Predictive Modeling – Methods and Techniques assessment requirement for the Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics credential will be released early next month. The third assessment is organized by the structure of a project.
Among the major areas covered are:
- Identifying the Business Problem
- Setting up the Project Design
- Exploratory Data Analysis Review
- Feature Selection & Regularization
- Model Choice/Selection & Performance Measures
- Marketing Applications
- Unsupervised Learning
- Fraud Detection
- Ethics
“The predictive modeling curriculum committee, chaired by Chris Monsour, CSPA, worked hard to ensure that the topics covered were both relevant and current,” iCAS Director Amy Brener said. “They are also cognizant of the need to balance the topics they felt the candidates really needed to know for the credential with a reasonable amount of study time and material.” The curriculum covers a variety of modeling techniques and methodologies.
Unlike the first two exams, the third assessment will utilize a technology platform that will allow the candidates to actually write code against provided datasets. While there are no specific prerequisites for this exam, test takers are expected to have a working knowledge of basic statistics (distributions, hypothesis tests, confidence intervals, maximum likelihood), a working knowledge of the basics of linear models (linear regression and principal components analysis, specifically) and some basic knowledge of R.
