Tim Verdonck

Tim Verdonck is a statistics and data science professor at the University of Antwerp, where he teaches probability and statistics at bachelor level and advanced analytics and actuarial courses at masters level. He is affiliated with KU Leuven’s Robust Statistics research group, ROBUST@Leuven – and previously taught at the University of Bologna and Université Catholique de Louvain.

Tim’s work concentrates on data science, statistical and machine learning with a focus on finance and insurance problems. He has done extensive research on fraud detection, insurance pricing, robust statistics, anomaly detection and dimension reduction techniques.

In the business world, Tim was co-founder and managing partner of Boltzmann, a team of machine learning experts. Boltzmann was acquired by Silverfin in 2021. He also co-founded of BlueCourses, a platform for online analytics courses. Together with Bart Baesens, he authored the DataCamp courses Fraud Detection in R and Data-Driven Decision Making in SQL.

At Vlerick, Tim is co-director of the Centre for Financial Leadership & Digital Transformation.

Who am I?

• Visiting Professor at Vlerick Business School
• Professor at University of Antwerp
• Doctor in Science (Mathematics) at University of Antwerp
• Master in Insurance and Master in Financial and Actuarial Engineering at KU Leuven
• Chairholder of the BNP Paribas Fortis Chair in Fraud Analytics, the Allianz Chair on Prescriptive Business Analytics in Insurance and the BASF Chair on Robust Predictive Analytics
• Associate editor of the journals Data Science in Science, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis and Statistics: A Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics. Guest Editor of special issue on Feature Engineering in ‘Machine Learning’
• Co-organiser of Data Science Meetups Leuven