Connecting the Dots: Economic Networks as Property Graphs We develop a quantitative framework that approaches economic networks from the point of view of contractual relationships between agents (and the interdependencies those generate). The representation of agent properties, transactions and contracts is done in the context of a property graph.
A typical use case for the proposed framework is the study of credit networks.
You can find the white paper here: (OpenRiskWP08_131219)
A survey of existing definitions of risk When looking up the meaning of Risk we are confronted with a surprising situation. There is no satisfying and authoritative general purpose one-line definition that we can adopt without second thoughts. Let us start with the standard dictionary definitions:
The online Merriam Webster Dictionary defines risk as the possibility of loss or injury The online Cambridge Dictionary opines that risk means the possibility of something bad happening The Oxford English (Concise, Hardcover!
What do people talk about at FOSDEM 2020 Introduction FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software. FOSDEM is held annually since 2001, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium.
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.
The trailblazing Wikidata project In this post we want to introduce another facility, an online database that allows the (relatively) easy publication of structured risk data.
NACE Classification and the EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy The integration of climate risk and broader sustainability constraints into risk management is a monumental task and many tools are still lacking. Yet there is strong support and bold initiatives from policy bodies and an increasing focus from the private sector side.
The EU (Sustainable Finance) Taxonomy is one such initiative of fundamental significance as it attempts to map at a granular level economic activities with respect to their climate risk mitigation or adaptation potential and create tangible metrics and thresholds to measure progress (the ultimate anti-greenwashing treatment)
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.
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).
A new logo for the Open Risk Manual We have updated the logo for the Open Risk Manual.
The new logo aims to make more explicit both the inspiration that the Open Risk Manual project draws from the trail-blazing Wikipedia initiative (and increasing collection of associated Wikimedia projects) and the reliance on the open source ecosystem of software and tools, including the mediawiki software and the important semantic mediawiki extension.
An overview of EU Financial Regulation initiatives In the European Union there are several ongoing large scale legislative and regulatory projects that transform the context within which individual, firms and the public sector interact economically. While financial and regulatory reform is an ongoing process in all jurisdictions globally, the size and supra-national nature of the European Union makes those projects particularly interesting.
A new entry at the Open Risk Manual aims to provide a brief overview of ongoing projects / initiatives.
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
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 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
What is a Risk Taxonomy? There are various formal definitions of risk taxonomies (and we will go over those below), but it might be useful to first look at a very intuitive example of a risk taxonomy: the classification of fire hazards (also known as fire classes)
Everybody knows (or should know!) that the different types of fire (which is the underlying Risk in this context) cannot be treated the same way because they respond in different ways to the substances used to suppress the fire.
Limit frameworks are fundamental tools for risk management A Limit Framework is a set of policies used by financial institutions (or other firms that actively assume quantifiable risks) to govern in a quantitative manner the maximum risk exposure permitted for an individual, trading desk, business line etc.
Why do we need limit frameworks? A limit framework is expressing in concrete terms the Risk Appetite of an institution to assume certain risks.
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 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.
Python versus R Language Motivation for the comparison A large component of risk management relies on data processing and quantitative tools. In turn, such information processing pipelines and numerical algorithms must be implemented in computer systems.
Computing systems come in an extraordinary large variety but in recent years open source software finds increased adoption for diverse applications (machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence). In particular cloud computing environments are primarily based on open source projects at the systems level.
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.
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.
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 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!
