[R] Percent damage distribution

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Not an R question as yet .....

In my limited experience (we have some insurance projets), 100% can occur, 
but otherwise a beta distbribution may suit, which suggests a mixture 
distribution.  But start with an empirical examination (histogram, ecdf, 
density plot) of the distribution, since it may reveal other features.

The next question is 'why model'?   For such a simple problem (a 
univariate distribution) a plot may be a sufficent analysis, and for e.g. 
simulation you could just re-sample the data.

On Thu, 25 Dec 2008, diegol wrote:

>
> R version: 2.7.0
> Running on: WinXP
>
> I am trying to model damage from fire losses (given that the loss occurred).
> Since I have the individual insured amounts, rather than sampling dollar
> damage from a continuous distribution ranging from 0 to infinity, I want to
> sample from a percent damage distribution from 0-100%. One obvious solution
> is to use runif(n, min=0, max=1), but this does not seem to be a good idea,
> since I would not expect damage to be uniform.
>
> I have not seen such a distribution in actuarial applications, and rather
> than inventing one from scratch I thought I'd ask you if you know one, maybe
> from other disciplines, readily available in R.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> -----
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Diego Mazzeo
> Actuarial Science Student
> Facultad de Ciencias Económicas
> Universidad de Buenos Aires
> Buenos Aires, Argentina
> -- 
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>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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