Kaas R., Goovaerts M., Dhaene J., Denuit M. Modern Actuarial Risk Theory. Using R

2nd ed. — Springer, 2008. — 381 p. — ISBN 3540709924.This book gives a comprehensive survey of non-life insurance mathematics. Originally written for use with the actuarial science programs at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leuven, it is now in use at many other universities, as well as for the non-academic actuarial education program organized by the Dutch Actuarial Society. It provides a link to the further theoretical study of actuarial science. The methods presented can not only be used in non-life insurance, but are also effective in other branches of actuarial science, as well as, of course, in actuarial practice.
Apart from the standard theory, this text contains methods directly relevant for actuarial practice, for example the rating of automobile insurance policies, premium principles and risk measures, and IBNR models. Also, the important actuarial statistical tool of the Generalized Linear Models is studied. These models provide extra possibilities beyond ordinary linear models and regression that are the statistical tools of choice for econometricians. Furthermore, a short introduction is given to credibility theory. Another topic which always has enjoyed the attention of risk theoreticians is the study of ordering of risks. The book reflects the state of the art in actuarial risk theory; many results presented were published in the actuarial literature only recently.
In this second edition of the book, we have aimed to make the theory even more directly applicable by using the software R. It provides an implementation of the language S, not unlike S-Plus. It is not just a set of statistical routines but a fullfledged object oriented programming language. Other software may provide similar capabilities, but the great advantage of R is that it is open source, hence available to everyone free of charge. This is why we feel justified in imposing it on the users of this book as a de facto standard. On the internet, a lot of documentation about R can be found. In an Appendix, we give some examples of use of R. After a general introduction, explaining how it works, we study a problem from risk management, trying to forecast the future behavior of stock prices with a simple model, based on stock prices of three recent years. Next, we show how to use R to generate pseudorandom datasets that resemble what might be encountered in actuarial practice.