Modeling Fundamentals

6/8/2026 - 3 min read

AI You Can Trust: Verisk as a Partner in Your AI Strategy

How Verisk helps insurers apply trustworthy AI to catastrophe risk—grounded in science, transparent by design, and built for real decisions.

5/27/2026 - 3 min read

AI in Catastrophe Modeling: How AI Reduces Manual Work and Accelerates Decisions

How Verisk uses embedded AI to streamline catastrophe modeling workflows, delivering faster insights, stronger governance, and repeatable results.

5/11/2026 - 4 min read

AI in Catastrophe Modeling: Embedded in the Science

How Verisk embeds AI into catastrophe science to deliver insurance risk insights—defensible, transparent, and grounded in physics at scale.

5/18/2022 - 12 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: A Novel Approach to Trending Historical Losses

Trending historical losses is not a new concept, but Verisk's approach has an advantage over other normalization methods.

7/28/2020 - 11 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Re-Evaluating the Seismic Vulnerability of Australia’s Major Construction Types

The 2020 update to the AIR Earthquake Model for Australia provided an opportunity to add support for new risk types and re-evaluate the modeled vulnerability for property in Australia. Cavity double brick masonry and masonry veneer constructions, which constitute the majority of residential buildings in Australia, are used as examples to illustrate this update in light of newly available data from Australia and New Zealand.

6/22/2020 - 13 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: So You Want to Issue a Cat Bond

In this article Harry White, CEEM, revisits our 2016 primer on the catastrophe bond issuance process to reflect changes in the cat bond market landscape and EES offerings

3/26/2020 - 6 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Loss Modification in Touchstone

Touchstone^® provides you with an option to modify ground-up losses based on a set of filter criteria, such as event, geography, exposure characteristics, and more.

10/16/2019 - 7 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Advanced Loss Modification in Touchstone Re

The Advanced Loss Modification (ALM) module in Touchstone Re™, the successor to and next generation of EMM in CATRADER™, enables companies to analyze global reinsurance treaties beyond the scope covered by AIR’s traditional suite of models and offers clients the flexibility to modify modeled losses and perform advanced sensitivity testing, all within the same reinsurance platform they are using today.

3/27/2019 - 15 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Why Does Verisk Conduct Post-Event Damage Surveys?

This article focuses primarily on damage surveys conducted in the aftermath of U.S. hurricanes and addresses how and why we conduct them. As we update our U.S. hurricane model—a tool that helps quantify the risk—we uncover more questions that are typically answered only after studying another event.

11/12/2018 - 17 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Understanding Tectonic Movement and How It Sheds Light on Seismic Risk

Kinematic modeling techniques use a physical approach to understanding earthquake risk, effectively augmenting the sparse available historical data. AIR Seismologist Dr. Bingming Shen-Tu explains what kinematic modeling is and provides real-world examples in South America, China, Japan, and New Zealand of how effective it is.

4/18/2018 - 12 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Understanding Uncertainty

In this article, Dr. Jayanta Guin, AIR Chief Research Officer, introduces some key concepts and answers the fundamental questions: What is uncertainty, where does it come from, and how is it treated in models?

4/24/2017 - 10 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Anatomy of a Damage Function

Explaining the inner workings of one of the most critical (and difficult to develop) components of a catastrophe model—its damage functions.

3/16/2017 - 8 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: The Dynamic Nature of Science in Catastrophe Modeling

This article is an update of an article originally published in 2009 in which Dr. Guin discusses why it is so important for scientists and engineers at AIR to determine whether competing approaches are credible and how much weight to assign to emerging science before a consensus is reached.

7/22/2015 - 7 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: Uncertainty Options in Software

This article outlines some ways in which users of AIR’s Touchstone platform can gain new insights into the uncertainty in their modeled loss estimates, create a framework for testing the sensitivity of results, and make better informed business decisions.

3/25/2013 - 5 min read

Modeling Fundamentals: What Is AAL?

This article explains the fundamentals behind the calculation of average annual loss (AAL). An upcoming article will address some common misperceptions and frequently asked questions.