Releases

New Open Risk Academy Course: Introduction to Geojson

New Open Risk Academy Course: Introduction to Geojson

Reading Time: 2 min.
Course Content This course is a CrashProgram (short course) introducing the GeoJSON specification for the encoding of geospatial features. The course is at an introductory technical level. It requires some familiarity with data specifications such as JSON and a very basic knowledge of Python Who Is This Course For The course is useful to: Any developer or data scientist that wants to work with geospatial features encoded in the geojson format How Does The Course Help Mastering the course content provides background knowledge towards the following activities:
New Open Risk Academy Course: Simulation of Credit Contagion

New Open Risk Academy Course: Simulation of Credit Contagion

Reading Time: 2 min.
Course Content: This course is an introduction to the concept of credit contagion. It covers the following topics: Contagion Risk Overview and Definition Various Contagion Types and Modelling Challenges The Simple Contagion Model by Davis and Lo Supply Chains Contagion Sovereign Contagion Who Is This Course For: The course is useful to: Risk Analysts across the financial industry and beyond Risk Management students Quantitative Risk Managers developing or validating risk models How Does The Course Help: Mastering the course content provides background knowledge towards the following activities:
Making Open Risk Data easier

Making Open Risk Data easier

We introduce an online database that allows the (relatively) easy publication of structured risk data

Reading Time: 1 min.
Making Open Risk Data easier: In an earlier blog post we discussed the promise of Open Risk Data and how the widespread availability of good information that is relevant for risk management can substantially help mitigate diverse risks. The list of Open Risk Data providers, particularly from public sector, keeps increasing and we are aiming to document all available datasets in the dedicated page of the Open Risk Manual.
Risk Model Ontology

Risk Model Ontology

Reading Time: 2 min.
Semantic Web Technologies: The Risk Model Ontology is a framework that aims to represent and categorize knowledge about risk models using semantic web information technologies. In principle any semantic technology can be the starting point for a risk model ontology. The Open Risk Manual adopts the W3C’s Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is a Semantic Web language designed to represent rich and complex knowledge about things, groups of things, and relations between things.
Federated Credit Risk Models

Federated Credit Risk Models

Reading Time: 4 min.
The motivation for federated credit risk models: Federated learning is a machine learning technique that is receiving increased attention in diverse data driven application domains that have data privacy concerns. The essence of the concept is to train algorithms across decentralized servers, each holding their own local data samples, hence without the need to exchange potentially sensitive information. The construction of a common model is achieved through the exchange of derived data (gradients, parameters, weights etc).
Overview of the Julia-Python-R Universe

Overview of the Julia-Python-R Universe

We introduce a side-by-side review of the main open source ecosystems supporting the Data Science domain: Julia, Python, R, the trio sometimes abbreviated as Jupyter

Reading Time: 3 min.
Overview of the Julia-Python-R Universe: A new Open Risk Manual entry offers a side-by-side review of the main open source ecosystems supporting the Data Science domain: Julia, Python, R, sometimes abbreviated as Jupyter. Motivation A large component of Quantitative Risk Management relies on data processing and quantitative tools (aka Data Science ). In recent years open source software targeting Data Science finds increased adoption in diverse applications. The overview of the Julia-Python-R Universe article is a side by side comparison of a wide range of aspects of Python, Julia and R language ecosystems.
Data Quality and Exploratory Data Analysis using Python

Data Quality and Exploratory Data Analysis using Python

Reading Time: 0 min.
Data Quality and Exploratory Data Analysis using Python In two new Open Risk Academy courses we figure step by step how to use python to work to review risk data from a data quality perspective and how to perform exploratory data analysis with pandas, seaborn and statsmodels: Introduction to Risk Data Review Exploratory Data Analysis using Pandas, Seaborn and Statsmodels
Open Source Securitisation

Open Source Securitisation

Reading Time: 5 min.
Open Source Securitisation: Motivation After the Great Financial Crisis securitisation has become the poster child of a financial product exhibiting complexity and opaqueness. The issues and lessons learned post-crisis were many, involving all aspects of the securitisation process, from the nature and quality of the underlying assets, the incentives of the various agents involved and the ability of investors to analyze the products they invested in. While the most egregious complications involved various types of re-securitisation and/or the interplay of structured credit derivatives undoubtedly even vanilla securitisation structure has a considerable amount of business logic.
Visualization of large scale economic data sets

Visualization of large scale economic data sets

Reading Time: 3 min.
Visualization of large scale economic data sets: Economic data are increasingly being aggregated and disseminated by Statistics Agencies and Central Banks using modern API’s (application programming interfaces) which enable unprecedented accessibility to wider audiences. In turn the availability of relevant information enables more informed decision making by a variety of actors in both public and private sectors. An excellent example of such a modern facility is the European Central Bank’s Statistical Data Warehouse (SDW), an online economic data repository that provides features to access, find, compare, download and share the ECB’s published statistical information.
ESMA Securitisation Templates are now documented at the Open Risk Manual

ESMA Securitisation Templates are now documented at the Open Risk Manual

Reading Time: 1 min.
ESMA Securitisation Templates are now documented at the Open Risk Manual: The ESMA Securitisation Templates are now fully documented at the Open Risk Manual. Users can browse, search and cross-reference with the rest of the knowledge base. Category Browsing The ESMA Templates Categories are part of both the Securitisation category and the Information Technology Category. Each one of the templates and each one of the sections within a template forms its own category.
Machine learning approaches to synthetic credit data

Machine learning approaches to synthetic credit data

Reading Time: 9 min.
The challenge with historical credit data: Historical credit data are vital for a host of credit portfolio management activities: Starting with assessment of the performance of different types of credits and all the way to the construction of sophisticated credit risk models. Such is the importance of data inputs that for risk models impacting significant decision making / external reporting there are even prescribed minimum requirements for the type and quality of necessary historical credit data.
Stressing Transition Matrices

Stressing Transition Matrices

Reading Time: 1 min.
Release of version 0.4.1 of the transitionMatrix package focuses on stressing transition matrices: Further building the open source OpenCPM toolkit this realease of transitionMatrix features: Feature: Added functionality for conditioning multi-period transition matrices Training: Example calculation and visualization of conditional matrices Datasets: State space description and CGS mappings for top-6 credit rating agencies Conditional Transition Probabilities The calculation of conditional transition probabilities given an empirical transition matrix is a highly non-trivial task involving many modelling assumptions.
Release 0.4 of transitionMatrix adds Aalen-Johansen estimators and many usability enhancements

Release 0.4 of transitionMatrix adds Aalen-Johansen estimators and many usability enhancements

Reading Time: 0 min.
Release of version 0.4 of the transitionMatrix package: Further building the open source OpenCPM toolkit this realease of transitionMatrix features: Feature: Added Aalen-Johansen Duration Estimator Documentation: Major overhaul of documentation, now targeting ReadTheDocs distribution Training: Streamlining of all examples Installation: Pypi and wheel installation options Datasets: Synthetic Datasets in long format Enjoy!
Version 0.4 of the Concentration Library adds geographic / industrial concentration functionality

Version 0.4 of the Concentration Library adds geographic / industrial concentration functionality

Reading Time: 1 min.
Release of version 0.4 of the Concentration Library adds Geographic / Industrial concentration indexes: Further building out the OpenCPM set of tools, we release version 0.4 of the Concentration Library, a python library for the computation of various concentration, diversification and inequality indices. The below list provides documentation URL’s for each one of the implemented classic indexes (the Hoover index is a new addition in this release Atkinson Index Hoover Index Concentration Ratio Berger-Parker Index Herfindahl-Hirschman Index Hannah-Kay Index Gini Index Theil Index Shannon Index Generalized Entropy Index Kolm Index An important new direction that appears first in this release is the introduction of indexes that measure geographical and industrial concentration.
NACE Economic Activity Pictograms

NACE Economic Activity Pictograms

Reading Time: 2 min.
Representing economic activity using pictograms: Visualization can produce significant new insights when applied to quantitative data. It is currently undergoing a renaissance that mirrors other developments in computing and data science. Sophisticated open source libraries such as d3.js or matplotlib, to name but a couple, are enabling an ever wider range of users to distill valuable information from the avalanche of data being produced. Yet when it comes to visualizing data that relate to abstract concepts it can be quite difficult to find an appropriate grammar to express the quantitative context.
Version 0.2 of the Open Risk API incorporates the standardized EBA portfolio data templates

Version 0.2 of the Open Risk API incorporates the standardized EBA portfolio data templates

Reading Time: 2 min.
Extending the Open Risk API to include the EBA Portfolio Data Templates: The Open Risk API provides a mechanism to integrate arbitrary collections of risk data and risk modelling resources in the context of assessing and managing financial risk. It is based on two key technologies of the modern Web, RESTful architectures and Semantic Data. OpenNPL, the credit portfolio management platfrom we launched recently fully integrates the latest versions of the Open Risk API.
Credit Portfolio Management in the IFRS 9 / CECL and Stress Testing Era

Credit Portfolio Management in the IFRS 9 / CECL and Stress Testing Era

Reading Time: 3 min.
Credit Portfolio Management in the IFRS 9 / CECL and Stress Testing Era: The post-crisis world presents portfolio managers with the significant challenge to asimilate in day-to-day management the variety of conceptual frameworks now simultaneously applicable in the assessment of portfolio credit risk: The first major strand is the widespread application of regulatory stress testing methodologies in the estimation of regulatory risk capital requirements The second major strand is the introduction of new accounting standards (IFRS 9 / CECL) for the measurement and disclosure of expected credit losses
A Risk Agnostic Approach to European Safe Bonds (ESBies) Tranching

A Risk Agnostic Approach to European Safe Bonds (ESBies) Tranching

Reading Time: 7 min.
What are European Safe Bonds? While the creation of the eurozone was a landmark of the European integration process, the financial crisis highlighted that the eurozone remains an incomplete design which can lead to unpredictable and adverse situations in the event of a (the) next major crisis. One of the key such incompleteness features of the current eurozone architecture is that it does not have a truly risk-free (safe) euro debt instrument: one that continues being serviced (avoids a default event) at virtually any point in time and state of the world, no matter how severe.
Release of version 0.3 of the Concentration Library

Release of version 0.3 of the Concentration Library

Reading Time: 0 min.
Release of version 0.3 of the Concentration Library: Further building out the OpenCPM set of tools, we release version 0.3 of the Concentration Library. This python library for the computation of various concentration, diversification and inequality indices. The below list provides documentation URL’s for each one of the implemented indexes Atkinson Index Concentration Ratio Berger-Parker Index Herfindahl-Hirschman Index Hannah-Kay Index Gini Index Theil Index Shannon Index Generalized Entropy Index Kolm Index The image illustrates a simple use of the library where the HHI and Gini indexes are computed and compared for a range of randomly generated portfolio exposures.
OpenNPL Database

OpenNPL Database

Reading Time: 2 min.
Motivation for Building an open source database based on EBA’s Standardized NPL Templates In a recent insightful piece “Overcoming non-performing loan market failures with transaction platforms”, Fell et al. dug deeply into the market failures that help perpetuate the NPL problem. They highlight, in particular, information asymmetries and the attendant costs of valuing NPL portfolios as key obstacles. In the same wavelength, the European Banking Authority published standardized NPL data templates as a step towards reducing the obstacles that prevent the reduction of NPL’s.