Backtesting Value-at-Risk: A Duration-Based Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Financial risk model evaluation or backtesting is a key part of the internal model’s approach to market risk management as laid out by the Basle Commitee on Banking Supervision (1996). However, existing backtesting methods such as those developed in Christoffersen (1998), have relatively small power in realistic small sample settings. Methods suggested in Berkowitz (2001) fare better, but rely on information such as the shape of the left tail of the portfolio return distribution, which is often not available. By far the most common risk measure is Value-at-Risk (V aR), which is defined as a conditional quantile of the return distribution, and it says nothing about the shape of the tail to the left of the quantile. Our contribution is the exploration of a new tool for backtesting based on the duration of days between the violations of the V aR. The chief insight is that if the V aR model is correctly specified for coverage rate, p, then the conditional expected duration between violations should be a constant 1/p days. We suggest various ways of testing this null hypothesis and we conduct a Monte Carlo analysis which compares the new tests to those currently available. Our results show that in realistic situations, the duration based tests have better power properties than the previously suggested tests. The size of the tests is easily controlled using the Monte Carlo technique of Dufour (2000). 1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".