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Stephen Richards

Managing Director

Articles written by Stephen Richards

A week is a long time in a pandemic

According to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, "a week is a long time in politics". As with politics, so also with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: coronavirus, Filter information matrix by tag: mortality

Significantly enhancing your models

In building a mortality model (or any other kind of risk model) it is usually best to build a single, over-arching model rather than split the data into sub-groups (an approach called stratification, the disadvantages of which are discussed in Macdonald et al (2018)).  One obvious reason is to reduce the total number of parameters: why fit two parameters for age when one will do?
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: enhancement, Filter information matrix by tag: concealment, Filter information matrix by tag: stratification

COVID-19 mortality and sex

I recently looked at the progression of Covid-19 mortality risk with age.  As with all-cause mortality, another risk factor for Covid-19 is biological sex.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: coronavirus, Filter information matrix by tag: mortality

COVID-19 mortality and age

When faced with a pandemic disease, such as the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, a multi-layered approach is useful.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: coronavirus, Filter information matrix by tag: mortality

Wash your hands, live longer

As the coronavirus circles the globe, the only thing spreading faster is disinformation on so-called "social media".  In addition to ridiculous conspiracy theories, quack preventions range from the ineffective to the downright dangerous.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: coronavirus, Filter information matrix by tag: influenza, Filter information matrix by tag: hygiene

Best practice in mortality work - regulatory comments

In a letter to the Chief Actuaries of UK insurance businesses, Malik (2019) highlighted two aspects of what the regulator regards as good practice in mortality work
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: season, Filter information matrix by tag: mortality improvements, Filter information matrix by tag: cohort effect

Mortality crossover

In a previous blog I discussed the importance of mortality convergence to actuaries, i.e. how mortality differentials narrow with age and how this interacts with discounting of cashflows.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: mortality convergence, Filter information matrix by tag: crossover

Model selection

When fitting a mortality model, analysts are faced with the decision of which risk factors to include or exclude.  One way of doing this is to look for the improvement in an information criterion that balances the fit against the number of parameters.  The bigger the improvement in the information criterion, the more strongly the model with the smaller value is preferred.

Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: information criterion, Filter information matrix by tag: AIC, Filter information matrix by tag: relative likelihood

Matrix repair

When fitting a statistical model we want two things as a minimum:

Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: information matrix, Filter information matrix by tag: covariance matrix

Mortality convergence

In his blog on socio-economic differentials in England and Wales, Torsten Kleinow showed how mortality rates between sub-groups converge with age. And in his blog on ill-health retirements, Kai Kaufhold demonstrated how excess mortality relative to normal retirements reduces, then vanishes.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: mortality convergence, Filter information matrix by tag: compensation law of mortality, Filter information matrix by tag: mortality plasticity