# Back in Leuven, for a talk on Nonparametric Estimation

I am currently in Leuven for a few days. It is always a pleasure to be back to the place where I defended my PhD, a few years ago.

I will give a talk, tomorrow, at noon, on nonparametric (and kernel related) inference for quantiles and risk measures, inspired by recent work with Emmanuel Flachaire. Our first paper log-transform kernel density estimationof income distribution is online  on http://papers.ssrn.com/id=2514882, and should appear soon. Another one it able to be finalised, soon.

# Somewhere else, part 193

Some posts and articles worth reading

# Somewhere else, part 192

Some posts and articles worth reading

# Somewhere else, part 191

Some posts and articles worth reading,

# Names in the U.S., from James Smith to Jose Rodriguez

Two weeks ago, @mona published an interesting post on her blog, about a difficult question, What’s The Most Common Name In America? There were stats about first names, in the U.S., and last names, too. Those informations are - somehow - easy to get. But usually, it is more complicated to get the first and the last name together. For confidentiality issues ! Datasets - the ones I deal with - are supposed to be anonymized, so I never see the first and the last names.  In a previous post, a few years ago, I did mention the so-called Social Security Death Master File. In that file, we have Social Security numbers, with the date of birth, the date of death as well as the first and the last name. So I did use those files to get stats about the first and the last names of American citizens. Of course, it is very restrictive. I have only U.S. citizens that have a Social Security number (which is not compulsary in the U.S. as far as I understood) and who passed away (as mentioned in the name of the dataset: the death master file). Another great thing about that dataset is that I have the date of birth, so I can look at some cohort effect (see opendata.stackexchange for an interesting discussion on that dataset).

# Somewhere else, part 190

Some posts and articles worth reading

# Subjective Ways of Cutting a Continuous Variables

You have probably seen @coulmont's maps. If you haven't, you should probably go and spend some time on his blog (but please, come back afterwards, I still my story to tell you). Consider for instance the maps we obtained for a post published in Monkey Cage, a few months ago,

The codes were discussed on a blog post (I spent some time on the econometric model, not really on the map, by that time).

My mentor in cartography, Reka (aka @visionscarto) taught me that maps were always subjective. And indeed.

# Somewhere else, part 189

Autumn is almost behind us...

(and yes, it's a leaf) Some posts and articles worth reading

# Confidence vs. Credibility Intervals

Tomorrow, for the final lecture of the Mathematical Statistics course, I will try to illustrate - using Monte Carlo simulations - the difference between classical statistics, and the Bayesien approach.

The (simple) way I see it is the following,

• for frequentists, a probability is a measure of the the frequency of repeated events, so the interpretation is that parameters are fixed (but unknown), and data are random
• for Bayesians, a probability is a measure of the degree of certainty about values, so the interpretation is that parameters are random and data are fixed

Or to quote Frequentism and Bayesianism: A Python-driven Primer,  a Bayesian statistician would say "given our observed data, there is a 95% probability that the true value of $\theta$ falls within the credible region" while a Frequentist statistician would say "there is a 95% probability that when I compute a confidence interval from data of this sort, the true value of $\theta$ will fall within it".

To get more intuition about those quotes, consider a simple problem, with Bernoulli trials, with insurance claims. We want to derive some confidence interval for the probability to claim a loss. There were $n$ = 1047 policies. And 159 claims.

Consider the standard (frequentist) confidence interval. What does that mean that

$\overline{x}\pm 1.96 \sqrt{\frac{\overline{x}(1-\overline{x})}{n}}$

is the (asymptotic) 95% confidence interval? The way I see it is very simple. Let us generate some samples, of size $n$, with the same probability as the empirical one, i.e. $\widehat{\theta}$ (which is the meaning of "from data of this sort"). For each sample, compute the confidence interval with the relationship above. It is a 95% confidence interval because in 95% of the scenarios, the empirical value lies in the confidence interval. From a computation point of view, it is the following idea,

> xbar <- 159
> n <- 1047
> ns <- 100
> M=matrix(rbinom(n*ns,size=1,prob=xbar/n),nrow=n)

I generate 100 samples of size $n$. For each sample, I compute the mean, and the confidence interval, from the previous relationship

> fIC=function(x) mean(x)+c(-1,1)*1.96*sqrt(mean(x)*(1-mean(x)))/sqrt(n)
> IC=t(apply(M,2,fIC))
> MN=apply(M,2,mean)

Then we plot all those confidence intervals. In red when they do not contain the empirical mean

> k=(xbar/n<IC[,1])|(xbar/n>IC[,2])
> plot(MN,1:ns,xlim=range(IC),axes=FALSE,
+ xlab="",ylab="",pch=19,cex=.7,
+ col=c("blue","red")[1+k])
> axis(1)
> segments(IC[,1],1:ns,IC[,2],1:
+ ns,col=c("blue","red")[1+k])
> abline(v=xbar/n)

Now, what about the Bayesian credible interval ? Assume that the prior distribution for the probability to claim a loss has a $\mathcal{B}(\alpha,\beta)$ distribution. We've seen in the course that, since the Beta distribution is the conjugate of the Bernoulli one, the posterior distribution will also be Beta. More precisely

$\mathcal{B}\left(\alpha+\sum x_i,\beta+n-\sum x_i\right)$

Based on that property, the confidence interval is based on quantiles of that (posterior) distribution

> u=seq(.1,.2,length=501)
> v=dbeta(u,1+xbar,1+n-xbar)
> plot(u,v,axes=FALSE,type="l")
> I=u<qbeta(.025,1+xbar,1+n-xbar)
> polygon(c(u[I],rev(u[I])),c(v[I],
+ rep(0,sum(I))),col="red",density=30,border=NA)
> I=u>qbeta(.975,1+xbar,1+n-xbar)
> polygon(c(u[I],rev(u[I])),c(v[I],
+ rep(0,sum(I))),col="red",density=30,border=NA)
> axis(1)

What does that mean, here, that we have a 95% credible interval. Well, this time, we do not draw using the empirical mean, but some possible probability, based on that posterior distribution (given the observations)

> pk <- rbeta(ns,1+xbar,1+n-xbar)

In green, below, we can visualize the histogram of those values

> hist(pk,prob=TRUE,col="light green",
+ border="white",axes=FALSE,
+ main="",xlab="",ylab="",lwd=3,xlim=c(.12,.18))

And here again, let us generate samples, and compute the empirical probabilities,

> M=matrix(rbinom(n*ns,size=1,prob=rep(pk,
+ each=n)),nrow=n)
> MN=apply(M,2,mean)

Here, there is 95% chance that those empirical means lie in the credible interval, defined using quantiles of the posterior distribution. We can actually visualize all those means : in black the mean used to generate the sample, and then, in blue or red, the averages obtained on those simulated samples,

> abline(v=qbeta(c(.025,.975),1+xbar,1+
+ n-xbar),col="red",lty=2)
> points(pk,seq(1,40,length=ns),pch=19,cex=.7)
> k=(MN<qbeta(.025,1+xbar,1+n-xbar))|
+ (MN>qbeta(.975,1+xbar,1+n-xbar))
> points(MN,seq(1,40,length=ns),
+ pch=19,cex=.7,col=c("blue","red")[1+k])
> segments(MN,seq(1,40,length=ns),
+ pk,seq(1,40,length=ns),col="grey")

More details and exemple on Bayesian statistics, seen with the eyes of a (probably) not Bayesian statistician in my slides, from my talk in London, last Summer,

# Somewhere else, part 188

Some posts and articles worth reading

# Somewhere else, part 187

Some posts and articles, worth reading,

# Somewhere else, part 186

Some posts and articles worth reading

# Reinterpreting Lee-Carter Mortality Model

Last week, while I was giving my crash course on R for insurance, we've been discussing possible extensions of Lee & Carter (1992) model. If we look at the seminal paper, the model is defined as follows

# Somewhere else, part 185

Some posts and articles worth reading, found somewhere else

# Somewhere else, part 184

Some posts and articles worth reading, published somewhere else

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