On the recursive evaluation of a certain multivariate compound distribution

In this paper, we extend to a multivariate setting the bivariate model A introduced by Jin and Ren in 2014 (Recursions and fast Fourier transforms for a new bivariate aggregate claims model, Scandinavian Actuarial Journal 8) to model insurance aggregate claims in the case when different types of claims simultaneously affect an insurance portfolio. We obtain an exact recursive formula for the probability function of the multivariate compound distribution corresponding to this model under the assumption that the conditional multivariate counting distribution (conditioned by the total number of claims) is multinomial. Our formula extends the corresponding one from Jin and Ren.     

Multivariate negative binomial models for insurance claim counts

It is no longer uncommon these days to find the need in actuarial practice to model claim counts from multiple types of coverage, such as the ratemaking process for bundled insurance contracts. Since different types of claims are conceivably correlated with each other, the multivariate count regression models that emphasize the dependency among claim types are more helpful for inference and prediction purposes. Motivated by the characteristics of an insurance dataset, we investigate alternative approaches to constructing multivariate count models based on the negative binomial distribution. A classical approach to induce correlation is to employ common shock variables. However, this formulation relies on the NB-I distribution which is restrictive for dispersion modeling. To address these issues, we consider two different methods of modeling multivariate claim counts using copulas. The first one works with the discrete count data directly using a mixture of max-id copulas that allows for flexible pair-wise association as well as tail and global dependence. The second one employs elliptical copulas to join continuitized data while preserving the dependence structure of the original counts. The empirical analysis examines a portfolio of auto insurance policies from a Singapore insurer where claim frequency of three types of claims (third party property damage, own damage, and third party bodily injury) are considered. The results demonstrate the superiority of the copula-based approaches over the common shock model. Finally, we implemented the various models in loss predictive applications.     

A dependent frequency–severity approach to modeling longitudinal insurance claims

In nonlife insurance, frequency and severity are two essential building blocks in the actuarial modeling of insurance claims. In this paper, we propose a dependent modeling framework to jointly examine the two components in a longitudinal context where the quantity of interest is the predictive distribution. The proposed model accommodates the temporal correlation in both the frequency and the severity, as well as the association between the frequency and severity using a novel copula regression. The resulting predictive claims distribution allows to incorporate the claim history on both the frequency and severity into ratemaking and other prediction applications. In this application, we examine the insurance claim frequencies and severities for specific peril types from a government property insurance portfolio, namely lightning and vehicle claims, which tend to be frequent in terms of their count. We discover that the frequencies and severities of these frequent peril types tend to have a high serial correlation over time. Using dependence modeling in a longitudinal setting, we demonstrate how the prediction of these frequent claims can be improved.     

On the Type I multivariate zero-truncated hurdle model with applications in health insurance

In the general insurance modeling literature, there has been a lot of work based on univariate zero-truncated models, but little has been done in the multivariate zero-truncation cases, for instance a line of insurance business with various classes of policies. There are three types of zero-truncation in the multivariate setting: only records with all zeros are missing, zero counts for one or some classes are missing, or zeros are completely missing for all classes. In this paper, we focus on the first case, the so-called Type I zero-truncation, and a new multivariate zero-truncated hurdle model is developed to study it. The key idea of developing such a model is to identify a stochastic representation for the underlying random variables, which enables us to use the EM algorithm to simplify the estimation procedure. This model is used to analyze a health insurance claims dataset that contains claim counts from different categories of claims without common zero observations.     

Modeling of claim exceedances over random thresholds for related insurance portfolios

Large claims in an actuarial risk process are of special importance for the actuarial decision making about several issues like pricing of risks, determination of retention treaties and capital requirements for solvency. This paper presents a model about claim occurrences in an insurance portfolio that exceed the largest claim of another portfolio providing the same sort of insurance coverages. Two cases are taken into consideration: independent and identically distributed claims and exchangeable dependent claims in each of the portfolios. Copulas are used to model the dependence situations. Several theorems and examples are presented for the distributional properties and expected values of the critical quantities under concern.     

Modeling of claim exceedances over random thresholds for related insurance portfolios

Large claims in an actuarial risk process are of special importance for the actuarial decision making about several issues like pricing of risks, determination of retention treaties and capital requirements for solvency. This paper presents a model about claim occurrences in an insurance portfolio that exceed the largest claim of another portfolio providing the same sort of insurance coverages. Two cases are taken into consideration: independent and identically distributed claims and exchangeable dependent claims in each of the portfolios. Copulas are used to model the dependence situations. Several theorems and examples are presented for the distributional properties and expected values of the critical quantities under concern.     

Generalized linear models for dependent frequency and severity of insurance claims

Traditionally, claim counts and amounts are assumed to be independent in non-life insurance. This paper explores how this often unwarranted assumption can be relaxed in a simple way while incorporating rating factors into the model. The approach consists of fitting generalized linear models to the marginal frequency and the conditional severity components of the total claim cost; dependence between them is induced by treating the number of claims as a covariate in the model for the average claim size. In addition to being easy to implement, this modeling strategy has the advantage that when Poisson counts are assumed together with a log-link for the conditional severity model, the resulting pure premium is the product of a marginal mean frequency, a modified marginal mean severity, and an easily interpreted correction term that reflects the dependence. The approach is illustrated through simulations and applied to a Canadian automobile insurance dataset.     

Explaining functional principal component analysis to actuarial science with an example on vehicle insurance

Given the high competitiveness in the vehicle insurance market, the need arises for an adequate pricing policy. To this end, insurance companies must select risks in a way that allows the expected claims ratio to come as close as possible to the real claims ratio. The use of new analytical tools which provide more information is of great interest. In this paper it is shown how functional principal component analysis can be useful in actuarial science. An empirical study is carried out with data from a Spanish insurance company to estimate the risk of occurrence of a claim in terms of the driver’s age, whilst taking into account other relevant variables.     

Conditional least squares and copulae in claims reserving for a single line of business

One of the main goals in non-life insurance is to estimate the claims reserve distribution. A generalized time series model, that allows for modeling the conditional mean and variance of the claim amounts, is proposed for the claims development. On contrary to the classical stochastic reserving techniques, the number of model parameters does not depend on the number of development periods, which leads to a more precise forecasting.Moreover, the time series innovations for the consecutive claims are not considered to be independent anymore. Conditional least squares are used to estimate model parameters and consistency of these estimates is proved. The copula approach is used for modeling the dependence structure, which improves the precision of the reserve distribution estimate as well.Real data examples are provided as an illustration of the potential benefits of the presented approach.     

Collective risk models with dependence

In actuarial science, collective risk models, in which the aggregate claim amount of a portfolio is defined in terms of random sums, play a crucial role. In these models, it is common to assume that the number of claims and their amounts are independent, even if this might not always be the case. We consider collective risk models with different dependence structures. Due to the importance of such risk models in an actuarial setting, we first investigate a collective risk model with dependence involving the family of multivariate mixed Erlang distributions. Other models based on mixtures involving bivariate and multivariate copulas in a more general setting are then presented. These different structures allow to link the number of claims to each claim amount, and to quantify the aggregate claim loss. Then, we use Archimedean and hierarchical Archimedean copulas in collective risk models, to model the dependence between the claim number random variable and the claim amount random variables involved in the random sum. Such dependence structures allow us to derive a computational methodology for the assessment of the aggregate claim amount. While being very flexible, this methodology is easy to implement, and can easily fit more complicated hierarchical structures.     

Sarmanov family of multivariate distributions for bivariate dynamic claim counts model

To predict future claims, it is well-known that the most recent claims are more predictive than older ones. However, classic panel data models for claim counts, such as the multivariate negative binomial distribution, do not put any time weight on past claims. More complex models can be used to consider this property, but often need numerical procedures to estimate parameters. When we want to add a dependence between different claim count types, the task would be even more difficult to handle. In this paper, we propose a bivariate dynamic model for claim counts, where past claims experience of a given claim type is used to better predict the other type of claims. This new bivariate dynamic distribution for claim counts is based on random effects that come from the Sarmanov family of multivariate distributions. To obtain a proper dynamic distribution based on this kind of bivariate priors, an approximation of the posterior distribution of the random effects is proposed. The resulting model can be seen as an extension of the dynamic heterogeneity model described in Bolancé et al. (2007). We apply this model to two samples of data from a major Canadian insurance company, where we show that the proposed model is one of the best models to adjust the data. We also show that the proposed model allows more flexibility in computing predictive premiums because closed-form expressions can be easily derived for the predictive distribution, the moments and the predictive moments.     

Bayesian multivariate Poisson models for insurance ratemaking

When actuaries face the problem of pricing an insurance contract that contains different types of coverage, such as a motor insurance or a homeowner’s insurance policy, they usually assume that types of claim are independent. However, this assumption may not be realistic: several studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between types of claim. Here we introduce different multivariate Poisson regression models in order to relax the independence assumption, including zero-inflated models to account for excess of zeros and overdispersion. These models have been largely ignored to date, mainly because of their computational difficulties. Bayesian inference based on MCMC helps to resolve this problem (and also allows us to derive, for several quantities of interest, posterior summaries to account for uncertainty). Finally, these models are applied to an automobile insurance claims database with three different types of claim. We analyse the consequences for pure and loaded premiums when the independence assumption is relaxed by using different multivariate Poisson regression models together with their zero-inflated versions.     

Operational time and a fundamental problem of insurance in a data-rich environment

A problem of current concern in the assessment of claims experience in non-life insurance is addressed. The problem relates to the interface of two well-defined areas of actuarial activity, namely reserving and rating. A model is proposed that permits the analysis of claim settlement experience in such a way as to allow for variations in settlement rate, proportions of nil claims and variations from year to year in a risk-factorial background. From this, the reserving approach may be developed coherently into the area of risk costing for rating purposes.     

Semiparametric model for prediction of individual claim loss reserving

The estimation of loss reserves for incurred but not reported (IBNR) claims presents an important task for insurance companies to predict their liabilities. Conventional methods, such as ladder or separation methods based on aggregated or grouped claims of the so-called “run-off triangle”, have been illustrated to have some drawbacks. Recently, individual claim loss models have attracted a great deal of interest in actuarial literature, which can overcome the shortcomings of aggregated claim loss models. In this paper, we propose an alternative individual claim loss model, which has a semiparametric structure and can be used to fit flexibly the claim loss reserving. Local likelihood is employed to estimate the parametric and nonparametric components of the model, and their asymptotic properties are discussed. Then the prediction of the IBNR claim loss reserving is investigated. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods.     

Analysis of a Multivariate Claim Process

The first part of this paper introduces a class of discrete multivariate phase-type (MPH) distributions. Recursive formulas are found for joint probabilities. Explicit expressions are obtained for means, variances and co-variances. The discrete MPH-distributions are used in the second part of the paper to study multivariate insurance claim processes in risk analysis, where claims may arrive in batches, the arrivals of different types of batches may be correlated and the amounts of different types of claims in a batch may be dependent. Under certain conditions, it is shown that the total amounts of claims accumulated in some random time horizon are discrete MPH random vectors. Matrix-representations of the discrete MPH-distributions are constructed explicitly. Efficient computational methods are developed for computing risk measures of the total claims of different types of claim batches and individual types of claims (e.g., joint distribution, mean, variance, correlation and value at risk.)     

On the analysis of time dependent claims in a class of birth process claim count models

An integral representation is derived for the sum of all claims over a finite interval when the claim value depends upon its incurral time. These time dependent claims, which generalize the usual compound model for aggregate claims, have insurance applications involving models for inflation and payment delays. The number of claims process is assumed to be a (possibly delayed) nonhomogeneous birth process, which includes the Poisson process, contagion models, and the mixed Poisson process, as special cases. Known simplified compound representations in these special cases are easily generalized to the conditional case, given the number of claims at the beginning of the interval. Applications to the case involving “two stages” are also considered.     

On some compound distributions with Borel summands

The generalized Poisson distribution is well known to be a compound Poisson distribution with Borel summands. As a generalization we present closed formulas for compound Bartlett and Delaporte distributions with Borel summands and a recursive structure for certain compound shifted Delaporte mixtures with Borel summands. Our models are introduced in an actuarial context as claim number distributions and are derived only with probabilistic arguments and elementary combinatorial identities. In the actuarial context related compound distributions are of importance as models for the total size of insurance claims for which we present simple recursion formulas of Panjer type.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of multinomial probit factor analysis models for multivariate t-distribution

We propose a model for multinomial probit factor analysis by assuming t-distribution error in probit factor analysis. To obtain maximum likelihood estimation, we use the Monte Carlo expectation maximization algorithm with its M-step greatly simplified under conditional maximization and its E-step made feasible by Monte Carlo simulation. Standard errors are calculated by using Louis’s method. The methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations.     

Applying copula models to individual claim loss reserving methods

The estimation of loss reserves for incurred but not reported (IBNR) claims presents an important task for insurance companies to predict their liabilities. Recently, individual claim loss models have attracted a great deal of interest in the actuarial literature, which overcome some shortcomings of aggregated claim loss models. The dependence of the event times with the delays is a crucial issue for estimating the claim loss reserving. In this article, we propose to use semi-competing risks copula and semi-survival copula models to fit the dependence structure of the event times with delays in the individual claim loss model. A nonstandard two-step procedure is applied to our setting in which the associate parameter and one margin are estimated based on an ad hoc estimator of the other margin. The asymptotic properties of the estimators are established as well. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods.     

Fair dynamic valuation of insurance liabilities: Merging actuarial judgement with market- and time-consistency

In this paper, we investigate the fair valuation of insurance liabilities in a dynamic multi-period setting. We define a fair dynamic valuation as a valuation which is actuarial (mark-to-model for claims independent of financial market evolutions), market-consistent (mark-to-market for any hedgeable part of a claim) and time-consistent, extending the work of Dhaene et al. (2017) and Barigou and Dhaene (2019). We provide a complete hedging characterization for fair dynamic valuations. Moreover, we show how to implement fair dynamic valuations through a backward iterations scheme combining risk minimization methods from mathematical finance with standard actuarial techniques based on risk measures.