This paper is intended as a guide to building insurance risk (loss) models. A typical model for insurance risk, the so-called collective risk model, treats the aggregate loss as having a compound distribution with two main components: one characterizing the arrival of claims and another...

In this paper, we present a procedure for consistent estimation of the severity and frequency distributions based on incomplete insurance data and demonstrate that ignoring the thresholds leads to a serious underestimation of the ruin probabilities. The event frequency is modelled with a...

Property Claim Services (PCS) provides indices for losses resulting from catastrophic events in the US. In this paper we study these indices and take a closer look at distributions underlying insurance claims. Surprisingly, the lognormal distribution seems to give a better fit than the Paretian...