Tag Archives: actuarial science

Optimal Transport for Actuarial Science (lecture notes)

Before leaving Kyoto to go back to Montréal (and enjoy some summer break), I uploaded some lecture notes, on Optimal Transport for Actuarial Science, on HAL (soon on ArXiv ?).

These lecture notes introduce optimal transport as a mathematical language for actuarial science. They treat losses, premiums, scores, reserves, capital scenarios, climate losses and lifetime distributions as probability measures that can be compared, transported, averaged, stressed and interpolated. The first part develops the main tools: couplings, push-forwards, discrete and continuous Kantorovich problems, duality, Wasserstein distances, quantile transport, barycenters, entropic regularization and statistical optimal transport. The second part applies these tools to risk measures, Wasserstein robustness, pricing and capital, portfolio drift, reserving cash-flow distributions, climate-prevention diagnostics, reinsurance, dependence uncertainty, capital allocation, distributional fairness diagnostics and longevity risk. Later chapters and appendices discuss counterfactual transport, dynamic formulations, unbalanced transport, Schrödinger bridges, cost engineering and computational labs in R. The emphasis is on actuarial modelling choices: the state space, the ground cost, the ambiguity radius, the reference distribution and the interpretation of the transport plan. Transport maps and couplings are used as distributional objects, not as causal claims unless additional assumptions are imposed.

(pictures will be coming in the updated version, this Fall).

Correlation, Causation, Circumstance, Context

This post was originally written and published in French, Corrélation et causalité, circonstance et contexte

Let’s imagine we collected a few pieces of information, for a clearly identified individuals, via connected devices,

  • Thursday 18:30: a €45 purchase at a bar-tabac
  • Friday 13:15, 1 hour above Porte Saint-Martin
  • Saturday 14:00, 1 hour near Place de la République

Trying to make the data “speak”, we might hesitate between a first version

  • Thursday 18:30: a €45 purchase of cigarettes
  • Friday 13:15, 1 hour at the mosque, at prayer time
  • Saturday 14:00, 1 hour in a demonstration that started from Place de la République in the early afternoon

and a second version

  • Thursday 18:30: a €45 purchase of tax stamps
  • Friday 13:15, 1 hour at the gym
  • Saturday 14:00, 1 hour at the hairdresser’s, Place de la République

In other words: with the very same raw signal, we can build two perfectly coherent stories. This is not an artistic trick à la Sophie Calle; it is the standard situation as soon as we work with traces (geolocation, timestamps, spending, calls, driving). Data do not necessarily lie. But they underdetermine the narrative, because they allow several possible worlds. In insurance (and more broadly in the economy of prediction), we are used to taking correlations and turning them into decisions—not only to “understand”, but to price, classify, accept, refuse. The point is not to say this is illegitimate in principle. The point is to recall what we do when we only correlate, and what we forget when we have no context.

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