  Stochastic simulation techniques are used for portfolio risk analysis. Risk
portfolios may consist of thousands of reinsurance contracts covering millions
of insured locations. To quantify risk each portfolio must be evaluated in up
to a million simulation trials, each capturing a different possible sequence of
catastrophic events over the course of a contractual year. In this paper, we
explore the design of a flexible framework for portfolio risk analysis that
facilitates answering a rich variety of catastrophic risk queries. Rather than
aggregating simulation data in order to produce a small set of high-level risk
metrics efficiently (as is often done in production risk management systems),
the focus here is on allowing the user to pose queries on unaggregated or
partially aggregated data. The goal is to provide a flexible framework that can
be used by analysts to answer a wide variety of unanticipated but natural ad
hoc queries. Such detailed queries can help actuaries or underwriters to better
understand the multiple dimensions (e.g., spatial correlation, seasonality,
peril features, construction features, and financial terms) that can impact
portfolio risk. We implemented a prototype system, called QuPARA (Query-Driven
Large-Scale Portfolio Aggregate Risk Analysis), using Hadoop, which is Apache's
implementation of the MapReduce paradigm. This allows the user to take
advantage of large parallel compute servers in order to answer ad hoc risk
analysis queries efficiently even on very large data sets typically encountered
in practice. We describe the design and implementation of QuPARA and present
experimental results that demonstrate its feasibility. A full portfolio risk
analysis run consisting of a 1,000,000 trial simulation, with 1,000 events per
trial, and 3,200 risk transfer contracts can be completed on a 16-node Hadoop
cluster in just over 20 minutes.
