Delta Dental is an insurance company that provides dental coverage to more than 80 million Americans, spanning across all 50 states, making them the largest dental care provider in the nation.

Delta Dental takes pride in tailoring benefit plans to their customers’ needs, whether they are a small business, a family or an individual. Before recommending the ideal benefit plan to a customer, Delta Dental underwriters must aggregate data from several sources and use their significant domain knowledge to properly recommend a benefit plan. Creating personalized dental plans for each customer takes a significant amount of time, as there are many factors that need to be considered.

Our Smart Benefit Plan Recommender Engine aids underwriters by automatically matching new customers with benefit plans that are used by similar customers, with no input from an underwriter. Potential customers use our website to answer a series of carefully crafted questions that are used to recommend a benefit plan.

Our Recommender Engine uses advanced machine learning algorithms to divide customers into groups that share many similarities. Each group is assigned an ideal benefit plan and when the system is given new data, it can easily provide a recommendation by mapping the new data to a group and its respective benefit plan.

Our system makes the insurance shopping experience less stressful for customers by allowing users to input their information through an easy-to-use interface and providing immediate benefit plan recommendations and links to help them enroll in the plan.

The front end of our system is written using Angular, while the back end is written in Python. The data is stored in a Snowflake database, and the clustering models were developed in Jupyter Notebook using the pandas and scikit-learn libraries.