Modelling Operational Risk Using a Bayesian Approach to Extreme Value Theory

Download or read book Modelling Operational Risk Using a Bayesian Approach to Extreme Value Theory written by María Elena Rivera Mancía and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Extreme-value theory is concerned with the tail behaviour of probability distributions. In recent years, it has found many applications in areas as diverse as hydrology, actuarial science, and finance, where complex phenomena must often be modelled from a small number of observations.Extreme-value theory can be used to assess the risk of rare events either through the block maxima or peaks-over-threshold method. The choice of threshold is both influential and delicate, as a balance between the bias and variance of the estimates is required. At present, this threshold is often chosen arbitrarily, either graphically or by setting it as some high quantile of the data.Bayesian inference is an alternative to deal with this problem by treating the threshold as a parameter in the model. In addition, a Bayesian approach allows for the incorporation of internal and external observations in combination with expert opinion, thereby providing a natural probabilistic framework to evaluate risk models.This thesis presents a Bayesian inference framework for extremes. We focus on a model proposed by Behrens et al. (2004), where an analysis of extremes is performed using a mixture model that combines a parametric form for the centre and a Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) for the tail of the distribution. Our approach accounts for all the information available in making inference about the unknown parameters from both distributions, the threshold included. A Bayesian analysis is then performed by using expert opinions to determine the parameters for prior distributions; posterior inference is carried out through Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. We apply this methodology to operational risk data to analyze its performance.The contributions of this thesis can be outlined as follows:-Bayesian models have been barely explored in operational risk analysis. In Chapter 3, we show how these models can be adapted to operational risk analysis using fraud data collected by different banks between 2007 and 2010. By combining prior information to the data, we can estimate the minimum capital requirement and risk measures such as the Value-at-Risk (VaR) and the Expected Shortfall (ES) for each bank.-The use of expert opinion plays a fundamental role in operational risk modelling. However, most of time this issue is not addressed properly. In Chapter 4, we consider the context of the problem and show how to construct a prior distribution based on measures that experts are familiar with, including VaR and ES. The purpose is to facilitate prior elicitation and reproduce expert judgement faithfully.-In Section 4.3, we describe techniques for the combination of expert opinions. While this issue has been addressed in other fields, it is relatively recent in our context. We examine how different expert opinions may influence the posterior distribution and how to build a prior distribution in this case. Results are presented on simulated and real data.-In Chapter 5, we propose several new mixture models with Gamma and Generalized Pareto elements. Our models improve upon previous work by Behrens et al. (2004) since the loss distribution is either continuous at a fixed quantile or it has continuous first derivative at the blend point. We also consider the cases when the scaling is arbitrary and when the density is discontinuous.-Finally, we introduce two nonparametric models. The first one is based on the fact that the GPD model can be represented as a Gamma mixture of exponential distributions, while the second uses a Dirichlet process prior on the parameters of the GPD model." --