Neural and Time-Series Approaches for Pricing Weather Derivatives: Performance and Regime Adaptation Using Satellite Data
This work addresses pricing accuracy for weather derivatives, which is crucial for financial and insurance sectors, though it is incremental by adapting existing neural methods to this domain.
The paper tackles pricing weather-derivative contracts on temperature and precipitation, finding that neural networks reduce out-of-sample mean-squared error and shift fair values compared to traditional models, and a convolutional neural network captures seasonal heterogeneity in precipitation parameters, leading to competitive valuations.
This paper studies pricing of weather-derivative (WD) contracts on temperature and precipitation. For temperature-linked strangles in Toronto and Chicago, we benchmark a harmonic-regression/ARMA model against a feed-forward neural network (NN), finding that the NN reduces out-of-sample mean-squared error (MSE) and materially shifts December fair values relative to both the time-series model and the industry-standard Historic Burn Approach (HBA). For precipitation, we employ a compound Poisson--Gamma framework: shape and scale parameters are estimated via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and via a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on 30-day rainfall sequences spanning multiple seasons. The CNN adaptively learns season-specific $(α,β)$ mappings, thereby capturing heterogeneity across regimes that static i.i.d.\ fits miss. At valuation, we assume days are i.i.d.\ $Γ(\hatα,\hatβ)$ within each regime and apply a mean-count approximation (replacing the Poisson count by its mean ($n\hatλ$) to derive closed-form strangle prices. Exploratory analysis of 1981--2023 NASA POWER data confirms pronounced seasonal heterogeneity in $(α,β)$ between summer and winter, demonstrating that static global fits are inadequate. Back-testing on Toronto and Chicago grids shows that our regime-adaptive CNN yields competitive valuations and underscores how model choice can shift strangle prices. Payoffs are evaluated analytically when possible and by simulation elsewhere, enabling a like-for-like comparison of forecasting and valuation methods.