A heavy-tail arctan-based mixture model for modelling and measuring actuarial risk

Abstract

Heavy-tailed probability distributions are extremely useful and play a crucial role in modeling different types of financial data sets. This study presents a two-pronged methodology. First, a mixture probability distribution is created by combining Gaussian and Rayleigh distributions using the arctangent transformation, aimed at producing heavier-tailed features and enhancing alignment with real market data. Some statistical properties of the proposed model are also discussed. Furthermore, essential actuarial risk evaluation instruments, such as value-at-risk (VaR), tail value-at-risk (TVaR) and tail variance (TV) are employed for efficient risk management practices. Lastly, an application is provided using an insurance dataset to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model. The proposed model demonstrates superior fitting performance compared to current baseline distributions, showcasing its practical value in financial risk evaluation. The combination of Gaussian and Rayleigh distributions through arctangent transformation is particularly successful in representing extreme market behaviour and tail dependencies that are frequently found in real-world financial data.