Using The Odp Bootstrap Model

This is a comprehensive and accessible reference source that documents the theoretical and practical aspects of all the key deterministic and stochastic reserving methods that have been developed for use in general insurance. Worked examples and mathematical details are included, along with many of the broader topics associated with reserving in practice. The key features of reserving in a range of different contexts in the UK and elsewhere are also covered. The book contains material that will appeal to anyone with an interest in claims reserving. It can be used as a learning resource for actuarial students who are studying the relevant parts of their professional bodies' examinations, as well as by others who are new to the subject. More experienced insurance and other professionals can use the book to refresh or expand their knowledge in any of the wide range of reserving topics covered in the book.

This book provides a compact introduction to the bootstrap method. In addition to classical results on point estimation and test theory, multivariate linear regression models and generalized linear models are covered in detail. Special attention is given to the use of bootstrap procedures to perform goodness-of-fit tests to validate model or distributional assumptions. In some cases, new methods are presented here for the first time. The text is motivated by practical examples and the implementations of the corresponding algorithms are always given directly in R in a comprehensible form. Overall, R is given great importance throughout. Each chapter includes a section of exercises and, for the more mathematically inclined readers, concludes with rigorous proofs. The intended audience is graduate students who already have a prior knowledge of probability theory and mathematical statistics.

Disk contains the library functions and documentation for use with Splus for Windows.

In this monograph, authors Greg Taylor and Gráinne McGuire discuss generalized linear models (GLM) for loss reserving, beginning with strong emphasis on the chain ladder. The chain ladder is formulated in a GLM context, as is the statistical distribution of the loss reserve. This structure is then used to test the need for departure from the chain ladder model and to consider natural extensions of the chain ladder model that lend themselves to the GLM framework.

This collection of articles addresses the most modern forms of loss reserving methodology: granular models and machine learning models. New methodologies come with questions about their applicability. These questions are discussed in one article, which focuses on the relative merits of granular and machine learning models. Others illustrate applications with real-world data. The examples include neural networks, which, though well known in some disciplines, have previously been limited in the actuarial literature. This volume expands on that literature, with specific attention to their application to loss reserving. For example, one of the articles introduces the application of neural networks of the gated recurrent unit form to the actuarial literature, whereas another uses a penalized neural network. Neural networks are not the only form of machine learning, and two other papers outline applications of gradient boosting and regression trees respectively. Both articles construct loss reserves at the individual claim level so that these models resemble granular models. One of these articles provides a practical application of the model to claim watching, the action of monitoring claim development and anticipating major features. Such watching can be used as an early warning system or for other administrative purposes. Overall, this volume is an extremely useful addition to the libraries of those working at the loss reserving frontier.

This book first provides a review of various aspects of Bayesian statistics. It then investigates three types of claims reserving models in the Bayesian framework: chain ladder models, basis expansion models involving a tail factor, and multivariate copula models. For the Bayesian inferential methods, this book largely relies on Stan, a specialized software environment which applies Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method and variational Bayes.

Classical unit root tests are known to suffer from potentially crippling size distortions, and a range of procedures have been proposed to attenuate this problem, including the use of bootstrap procedures. It is also known that the estimating equation's functional form can affect the outcome of the test, and various model selection procedures have been proposed to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we adopt a model averaging procedure to deal with model uncertainty at the testing stage. In addition, we leverage an automatic model-free dependent bootstrap procedure where the null is imposed by simple differencing (the block length is automatically determined using recent developments for bootstrapping dependent processes). Monte Carlo simulations indicate that this approach exhibits the lowest size distortions among its peers in settings that confound existing approaches, while it has superior power relative to those peers whose size distortions do not preclude their general use. The proposed approach is fully automatic, and there are no nuisance parameters that have to be set by the user, which ought to appeal to practitioners.