SEVERITY Procedure

(View the complete code for this example.)

A finite mixture model is a stochastic model that postulates that the probability distribution of the data generation process is a mixture of a finite number of probability distributions. For example, when an insurance company analyzes loss data from multiple policies that are underwritten in different geographic regions, some regions might behave similarly, but the distribution that governs some regions might be different from the distribution that governs other regions. Further, it might not be known which regions behave similarly. Also, the larger amounts of losses might follow a different stochastic process from the stochastic process that governs the smaller amounts of losses. It helps to model all policies together in order to pool the data together and exploit any commonalities among the regions, and the use of a finite mixture model can help capture the differences in distributions across regions and ranges of loss amounts.

Formally, if and denote the PDF and CDF, respectively, of component distribution i and represents the mixing probability that is associated with component i, then the PDF and CDF of the finite mixture of K distribution components are

where denotes the parameters of component distribution i and denotes the parameters of the mixture distribution, which is a union of all the parameters. denotes the set of mixing probabilities. All mixing probabilities must add up to 1 ().

You can define the finite mixture of a specific number of components and specific distributions for each of the components by defining the FCMP functions for the PDF and CDF. However, in general, it is not possible to fit a scale regression model by using any finite mixture distribution unless you take special care to ensure that the mixture distribution has a scale parameter. This example provides a formulation of a two-component finite mixture model that has a scale parameter.

To start with, each component distribution must have either a scale parameter or a log-transformed scale parameter. Let and denote the scale parameters of the first and second components, respectively. Let be the mixing probability, which makes by using the constraint on . The PDF of the mixture of these two distributions can be written as

where and denote the sets of nonscale parameters of the first and second components, respectively, and denotes a union of and . For the mixture to have the scale parameter , the PDF must be of the form

where , , and denote the modified sets of nonscale parameters. One simple way to achieve this is to make and ; that is, you simply equate the scale parameters of both components and keep the set of nonscale parameters unchanged. However, forcing the scale parameters to be equal in both components is restrictive, because the mixture cannot model potential differences in the scales of the two components. A better approach is to tie the scale parameters of the two components by a ratio such that and . If the ratio parameter is estimated along with the other parameters, then the mixture distribution becomes flexible enough to model the variations across the scale parameters of individual components.

To summarize, the PDF and CDF are of the following form for the two-component mixture that has a scale parameter:

This can be generalized to a mixture of K components by introducing the ratio parameters that relate the scale parameters of each of the K components to the scale parameter of the mixture distribution as follows:

In order to illustrate this approach, define a mixture of two lognormal distributions by using the following PDF function:

You can verify that serves as the log of the scale parameter (). The following PROC FCMP steps encode this formulation in a distribution named SLOGNMIX2 for use with PROC SEVERITY:

/*- Define Mixture of 2 Lognormal Distributions with a Log-Scale Parameter -*/
proc fcmp library=sashelp.svrtdist outlib=work.sevexmpl.models;
   function slognmix2_description() $128;
      return ("Mixture of two lognormals with a log-scale parameter Mu");
   endsub;

   function slognmix2_scaletransform() $8;
      return ("LOG");
   endsub;

   function slognmix2_pdf(x, Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2);
      Mu1 = Mu;
      Mu2 = Mu + log(Rho2);
      pdf1 = logn_pdf(x, Mu1, Sigma1);
      pdf2 = logn_pdf(x, Mu2, Sigma2);
      return ((1-p2)*pdf1 + p2*pdf2);
   endsub;

   function slognmix2_cdf(x, Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2);
      Mu1 = Mu;
      Mu2 = Mu + log(Rho2);
      cdf1 = logn_cdf(x, Mu1, Sigma1);
      cdf2 = logn_cdf(x, Mu2, Sigma2);
      return ((1-p2)*cdf1 + p2*cdf2);
   endsub;

   subroutine slognmix2_parminit(dim, x[*], nx[*], F[*], Ftype,
                               Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2);
      outargs Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2;
      array m[1] / nosymbols;
      p2 = 0.5;
      Rho2 = 0.5;
      median = svrtutil_percentile(0.5, dim, x, F, Ftype);
      Mu = log(2*median/1.5);
      call svrtutil_rawmoments(dim, x, nx, 1, m);
      lm1 = log(m[1]);

      /* Search Rho2 that makes log(sample mean) > Mu */
      do while (lm1 <= Mu and Rho2 < 1);
         Rho2 = Rho2 + 0.01;
         Mu = log(2*median/(1+Rho2));
      end;
      if (Rho2 >= 1) then
         /* If Mu cannot be decreased enough to make it less
            than log(sample mean), then revert to Rho2=0.5.
            That will set Sigma1 and possibly Sigma2 to missing.
            PROC SEVERITY replaces missing initial values with 0.001. */
         Mu = log(2*median/1.5);

      Sigma1 = sqrt(2.0*(log(m[1])-Mu));
      Sigma2 = sqrt(2.0*(log(m[1])-Mu-log(Rho2)));
   endsub;

   subroutine slognmix2_lowerbounds(Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2);
      outargs Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2;
      Mu = .; /* Mu has no lower bound */
      Sigma1 = 0; /* Sigma1 > 0 */
      p2 = 0; /* p2 > 0 */
      Rho2 = 0; /* Rho2 > 0 */
      Sigma2 = 0; /* Sigma2 > 0 */
   endsub;

   subroutine slognmix2_upperbounds(Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2);
      outargs Mu, Sigma1, p2, Rho2, Sigma2;
      Mu = .; /* Mu has no upper bound */
      Sigma1 = .; /* Sigma1 has no upper bound */
      p2 = 1; /* p2 < 1 */
      Rho2 = 1; /* Rho2 < 1 */
      Sigma2 = .; /* Sigma2 has no upper bound */
   endsub;
quit;

As shown in previous examples, an important aspect of defining a distribution for use with PROC SEVERITY is the definition of the PARMINIT subroutine that initializes the parameters. For mixture distributions, in general, the parameter initialization is a nontrivial task. For a two-component mixture, some simplifying assumptions make the problem easier to handle. For the initialization of SLOGNMIX2, the initial values of and are fixed at 0.5, and the following two simplifying assumptions are made:

Even when the preceding assumptions are not true for a given problem, they produce reasonable initial values to help guide the nonlinear optimizer to an acceptable optimum if the mixture of two lognormal distributions is indeed a good fit for your input data. This is illustrated by the results of the following steps that fit the SLOGNMIX2 distribution to simulated data, which have different means for the two components (12.18 and 22.76, respectively), and the median of the sample (15.94) is not equal to the average of the medians of the two components (7.39 and 20.09, respectively):

/*-------- Simulate a lognormal mixture sample ----------*/
data testlognmix(keep=y);
   call streaminit(12345);
   Mu1 = 2;
   Sigma1 = 1;
   i = 0;
   do j=1 to 2000;
      y = exp(Mu1) * rand('LOGNORMAL')**Sigma1;
      output;
   end;
   Mu2 = 3;
   Sigma2 = 0.5;
   do j=1 to 3000;
      y = exp(Mu2) * rand('LOGNORMAL')**Sigma2;
      output;
   end;
run;

/*-- Fit and compare scale regression models with 2-component  --*/
/*-- lognormal mixture and the standard lognormal distribution --*/
options cmplib=(work.sevexmpl);

proc severity data=testlognmix print=all plots(histogram kernel)=all;
   loss y;
   dist slognmix2 logn;
run;

The comparison of the fit statistics of SLOGNMIX2 and LOGN, as shown in Output 28.7.1, confirms that the two-component mixture is certainly a better fit to these data than the single lognormal distribution.

The comparative plot of probability densities in Output 28.7.2 shows that the density function of the mixture distribution is bimodal. In fact, one of the key motivations for using mixture distributions is to find better-fitting models for multimodal data.

The P-P and Q-Q plots in Figure 28 visually confirm that SLOGNMIX2 fits the data very well.

The detailed results for the SLOGNMIX2 distribution are shown in Output 28.7.3. According to the "Initial Parameter Values and Bounds" table, the initial value of is not 0.5, indicating that a linear search was conducted to ensure .

By using the relationship that , you can see that the final parameter estimates are indeed close to the true parameter values that were used to simulate the input sample.