Some questions in risk management and high-dimensional data analysis

Abstract

This thesis addresses three topics in the area of statistics and probability, with applications in risk management. First, for the testing problems in the high-dimensional (HD) data analysis, we present a novel method to formulate empirical likelihood tests and jackknife empirical likelihood tests by splitting the sample into subgroups. New tests are constructed to test the equality of two HD means, the coefficient in the HD linear models and the HD covariance matrices. Second, we propose jackknife empirical likelihood methods to formulate interval estimations for important quantities in actuarial science and risk management, such as the risk-distortion measures, Spearman's rho and parametric copulas. Lastly, we introduce the theory of completely mixable (CM) distributions. We give properties of the CM distributions, show that a few classes of distributions are CM and use the new technique to find the bounds for the sum of individual risks with given marginal distributions but unspecific dependence structure. The result partially solves a problem that had been a challenge for decades, and directly leads to the bounds on quantities of interest in risk management, such as the variance, the stop-loss premium, the price of the European options and the Value-at-Risk associated with a joint portfolio.