Description: This is an abstract for the paper, Analysis of Costs for a Chronic Disease with Acute High Cost Episodes by Marjorie Rosenberg and Philip Farrell.

Description: Premium computation in a Bayesian context requires the use of a prior distribution [structure function] that the risk parameter follows in the heterogeneous portfolio. This paper contributes to the analysis of credibility theory by identifying the unique relationship between the prior distribution and credibility formula. The latter corresponds to a suggestive form of expressing the premium to be charged to a policyholder as a weighted sum of the sample mean and collective premium. Results for net premium principle and Poisson and negative binomial likelihood functions are shown.

Description: Poisson regression models are commonly used in actuarial science to model count data e.g., the number of claims and covariates. The standard parametric formulation assumes that the response to covariates is constant across the population under study. Additionally, the shape of the posterior distribution is rather inflexible. In practice, however, the response to covariates may depend on a latent class and the posterior distribution may be highly nonparametric. This paper proposes a Bayesian nonparametric model in which a Dirichlet process prior on the regression coefficients leads to a clustering of observations into groups having the same response to covariates. This paper illustrates the utility of this approach with an example dataset of diabetes deaths.