Understand and interpret the characteristics of severity distributions.

Free SOA Exam ASTAM (Advanced Short-Term Actuarial Mathematics) lesson in Severity Models. 9 min read, ~1,325 words.

Severity is a non-negative, right-skewed continuous random variable; characterize it by,, and the hazard. Light-tailed families (gamma, Weibull ) have all moments; heavy-tailed families (Pareto, lognormal, Weibull ) have explosive or infinite tails. A tail is heavy when the MGF fails to exist or the hazard tends to zero; a...

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