Information Matrix

Last week I presented at the Longevity 18 conference.  My topic was on robustifying stochastic mortality models when the calibrating data contain outliers, such as caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  A copy of the presentation can be downloaded here, which is based on a paper to be presented at an IFoA sessional meeting in N

The covid-19 pandemic caused mortality shocks in many countries, and these shocks severely impact the standard forecasting models used by actuaries.  I previously showed how to robustify time-series models with a univariate index (Lee-Carter, APC) and those with a multivariate index (Cairns-Blake-Dowd, Ta

In earlier blogs I discussed two techniques for handling outliers in mortality forecasting models:

• Chen & Liu (1993) for ARIMA models for univariate time series, and

In my previous blog I showed how univariate stochastic mortality models, like the Lee-Carter and APC models, can be robustified to cope with data affected by the covid-19 pandemic.  Such robustification is necessary because outliers, such as the 2020 experience, bias parameter estimates and affect value-at-risk (VaR) capital requirements.  Kleinow & Richards (2016) showed how one-year VaR-style capital requirements are heavily de

The covid-19 pandemic led to high levels of mortality in many countries in 2020. Figure 1 shows that the number of deaths in England & Wales in 2020 was an outlier compared to preceding years.

Figure 1. Total deaths by calendar year for females in England & Wales. Source: HMD data, ages 50–105.