Modeling Cyber Loss Severity Using a Spliced Regression Distribution with Mixture Components

Abstract

Cyber losses in terms of number of records breached under cyber incidents commonly feature a significant portion of zeros, specific characteristics of mid-range losses and large losses, which make it hard to model the whole range of the losses using a standard loss distribution. We tackle this modeling problem by proposing a three-component spliced regression model that can simultaneously model zeros, moderate and large losses and consider heterogeneous effects in mixture components. To apply our proposed model to Privacy Right Clearinghouse (PRC) data breach chronology, we segment geographical groups using unsupervised cluster analysis, and utilize a covariate-dependent probability to model zero losses, finite mixture distributions for moderate body and an extreme value distribution for large losses capturing the heavy-tailed nature of the loss data. Parameters and coefficients are estimated using the Expectation - Maximization (EM) algorithm. Combining with our frequency model (generalized linear mixed model) for data breaches, aggregate loss distributions are investigated and applications on cyber insurance pricing and risk management are discussed.