A maximum entropy approach to the loss data aggregation problem Articles uri icon

publication date

  • January 2016

start page

  • 49

end page

  • 70

issue

  • 1

volume

  • 11

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1744-6740

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1755-2710

abstract

  • One of the main problems in the advanced measurement approach - determining operational risk regulatory capital - consists of the computation of the distribution of losses when the data is made up of aggregated losses caused by different types of risk events in different business lines. A similar problem appears in the insurance industries when there is a need to aggregate losses of different types. When the data is collected well, that is, when the losses are collected as a joint vector, the maxentropic techniques are quite suitable for finding the probability density of the aggregated loss. When the data is not collected well, the maxentropic procedure provides us with marginal densities, which can then be coupled by means of some appropriate copula, carrying on one of the two procedures that we apply. At any rate, the two possibilities hinge in an essential way on the maxentropic technique to determine a probability density from its Laplace transform.

keywords

  • loss data analysis; loss aggregation; maximum entropy method; density reconstruction; regulatory capital; operational risk; operational risk; banks