Dr Debora Escobar

This course is available on the BSc in Actuarial Science, BSc in Business Mathematics and Statistics and BSc in Mathematics, Statistics and Business. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

Students must have completed Probability, Distribution Theory and Inference (ST202) and Stochastic Processes (ST302).

An introduction to actuarial work in non-life insurance. Decision theory concepts: game theory, optimum strategies, decision functions, risk functions, the minimax criterion and the Bayes criterion. Loss distributions with and without limits and risk-sharing arrangements; suitable, moments and moment generating functions, the gamma, exponential, Pareto, generalised Pareto, normal, lognormal, Weibull, Burr and other distributions suitable for modelling individual and aggregate losses; statistical inference. Risk models involving frequency and severity distributions; the basic short-term contracts, moments, moment generating functions and other properties of compound distributions. Reinsurance treaties; proportional, excess of loss, stop-loss, deriving the distribution, moments, moment generating functions and other properties of the losses to the insurer and reinsurer under all the models above. Ruin theory for continuous and discrete models. Fundamental concepts of Bayesian statistics; Bayes theorem, prior distributions, posterior distributions, conjugate prior distributions, loss functions, Bayesian estimators. Credibility theory; Bayesian models. Experience rating models and applications. Claims reserving: run-off triangles. Monte-Carlo simulation and applications in insurance.

This course will be delivered through a combination of classes, lectures and Q&A sessions totalling a minimum of 30 hours across Lent Term. This year, some of this teaching may be delivered through a combination of virtual classes and flipped-lectures delivered as short online videos.

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Notes are given out in the lectures. 

Exam (90%, duration: 3 hours) in the summer exam period.
Coursework (10%) in the LT and ST.

Coursework is timed (2hr + submission time)

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.