An Application of Image Processing Techniques in the Calibration of Catastrophe Models

Abstract

Actuaries depend primarily on simulations to build catastrophe (cat) models. By applying image processing techniques such as the novel convolutional neural network (CNN), it is possible to use both numeric and map data to improve modeling. To this end, we illustrated applying CNN to calibrate a cat model, using the more efficient U-Net architecture, which has been shown to perform well with limited data because of its localized predictive ability. We evaluated our CNN model using real-life data obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We also used these data to build a more traditional generalized linear model and compared the results with those from the CNN model. We found that even with limited data, the CNN model performed well