2.1 Description

The data set from the PRC ^{Footnote 1} contains 8,871 data breaches which have been made public since 2005. Our study focuses on the period 2010–2019, to avoid too much heterogeneity in the type of sources reporting the cyber breaches to the PRC data set. Indeed, although data breach notification laws have been enacted at different dates in different states, many of them were enacted before 2010; therefore, we decided to study the database from this date. For each breach, the following information is available:

1. • name of the covered entity;

2. • type of the covered entity;

3. • localisation of the breached entity;

4. • breach submission date;

5. • type of breach;

6. • number of individuals affected;

7. • localisation of the breached information;

8. • source of information (US Government Agencies, non-profit organisations, media…).

In Table 1, we present the classification of the types of breaches within the PRC (column “Origin”), as well as our preliminary aggregation as used in this paper (column “Aggregation”), which will be further discussed in section 4. The main types of breaches and entities recorded in the data set are depicted in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2 shows three main categories that contain around 75.7% of the data. One can also remark the high level of unintended disclosure (21.1%) and non-electronic data (21.8%).

Table 2.

Type of organisation breached – origin refers to the PRC classification – aggregation refers to our classification.

Figure 2

PRC types of breaches.

Figure 3

PRC types of organisations breached.

The Healthcare industry seems to experience far more breaches than others, even than the Businesses, despite they have a lower exposure in terms of number of entities. It may be explained by the fact that personal health information is often more valuable on the black market than other data as it is the case for credit card credentials. The second industry mainly targeted is the businesses. The PRC classification as well as our own aggregation is depicted in Table 2.

In Appendix A, the table with the number of breaches reported in each state shows a clear heterogeneity. While California counts more than 15% of the total data available, many states such as Alabama or Arkansas are under 1%. This fact could be linked with the age of the notification law in each state as well as the exposure in terms of number of entities at risk.

2.2 Aggregation

In order to get larger groups for the following study, we decided to group the attack types according to their similarities, see Table 1. The types PHYS, PORT and STAT are gathered in a new category named Theft/Loss. In the same way, we grouped CARD and INSD in a new category named Other. These categories represent, respectively, 32.3% and 7.5% of the database.

Concerning the organisation types, with the same arguments, we grouped BSF, BSO and BSR in a category named BUSINESSES. NGO, EDU and GOV are put in a OtherOrga category. It leads to a representation of 25.5% and 12.8% of the total database; these are detailed in Table 2.

Finally, because of the high heterogeneity of the number of breaches reported in each state, we made a main group named OtherStates (71.1%) and kept the three biggest ones, namely, California (15.7%), Texas (6.9%) and New-York (6.3%).

This granularity which has been derived at this stage of the analysis will be further discussed and aggregated in Section 4.

3.1 Model specification

To fix the idea, we recall briefly the definition and main properties of a Hawkes process. A standard (one-dimensional) Hawkes process $(N_t)_{t\geq 0}$ is a self-exciting point process defined by its intensity function $(\lambda_t)_{t\geq 0}$ characterised by a baseline intensity $(\mu_t)_{t\geq 0}$ plus a self-exciting part $ \sum_{T_n < t} \phi(t-T_n),$ where $T_n$ is the jump time number n, and $\phi$ is a function which governs the clustering density of $(N_t)_{t\geq 0}$ , also called the excitation function or kernel of the Hawkes process. Recall that the intensity $(\lambda_t)_{t\geq 0}$ represents the “instantaneous probability” to have a jump at time t, given all the past. This basically means that there is a baseline rate $(\mu_t)_{t\geq 0}$ to have a spontaneous jump at t but that also all the previous jumps influence the apparition of a jump at t. The existence (using Picard iteration) and the construction (using a thinning procedure) of such processes can be found in Brémaud & Massoulié (Reference Brémaud and Massoulié1996), Brémaud & Massoulié (Reference Brémaud and Massoulié2002). One could also find in Daley & Vere-Jones (Reference Daley and Vere-Jones2007) the main definitions, constructions and models related to point processes in general and Hawkes processes in particular.

In what follows, a multivariate Hawkes process is considered to capture the clustering and the autocorrelation between inter-arrival times, according to each data breach feature. We consider d groups of data breaches; these groups can be defined by crossing the several covariate dimensions as described in section 2. For example, a given group can relate to data breaches of

1. • the same type (e.g. THEFT/LOSS);

2. • towards same entities (e.g. MED);

3. • in same location (e.g. California).

We consider a time origin at zero being set as the beginning of the first year of the historical period. From this time, data breaches occur in each group $i \in \{1,...,d\}$ at random times denoted by $(T_n^{(i)})_{n\geq 1}$ . This sequence defines a counting process $(N^{(i)}_t)_{t\geq 0}$ as

\begin{equation*}N^{(i)}_t=\sum_{n\geq 1} {\mathbf{1}}_{T^{(i)}_n\leq t}\end{equation*}

Therefore, $N^{(i)}_t$ is the number of data breaches which occurred for group i in the time interval [0, t]. The intensity process of $(N^{(i)}_t)_{t\geq 0}$ is denoted by $(\lambda_t^{(i)})_{t\geq 0}$ .

We propose a Hawkes process to model the self-excitation in each group as well the excitation between groups. It is specified as follows.

1. • For each $i\in\{1,...,d\}$ , the base intensity is a deterministic, continuous and non-negative map $t \mapsto \mu_t^{(i)}$ .

2. • For each $(i,j)\in\{1,...,d\}^2$ , self- and mutually exciting maps $t \mapsto \phi_{i,j}(t)$ (commonly called kernels) are introduced and also assumed to be deterministic, continuous and non-negative.

3. • For each $i\in\{1,...,d\}$ , the intensity process of $(N^{(i)}_t)_{t\geq 0}$ is specified as follows:

   (1) \begin{equation}\lambda_t^{(i)}=\mu_t^{(i)}+\sum_{j=1}^d \sum_{T_n^{(j)} < t} \phi_{i,j}\left(t-T_n^{(j)}\right)=\mu_t^{(i)}+\sum_{j=1}^d \int_{[0,t[} \phi_{i,j}(t-s) {{d}} N_s^{(j)}\end{equation}

In this model, the maps $\phi_{i,i}$ quantify the self-excitation in the group i, whereas for $i\neq j$ , the map $\phi_{i,j}$ quantifies the contagion in group i caused by a data breach in group j. Note here that each intensity process $\lambda^{(i)}$ is adapted to the canonical filtration associated with the whole set of processes $(N^{(j)})_{j\in \{1,...,d \}}$ ; in this way, the behaviour of a given group may (generally) depend on that of the others.

The framework of interest in this paper is made of the two following kernels specifications:

(2) \begin{eqnarray} \phi_{i,j}(t) & = & \alpha_{i,j} \exp \left( - \beta_{i,j} t\right)\nonumber\\ \phi_{i,j}(t) & = & \alpha_{i,j}t \exp \left( - \beta_{i,j} t\right)\end{eqnarray}

Examples of such kernels are provided in Figure 4. The first one models an instantaneous excitation when an event occurs, and then it decreases exponentially towards zero. It is the most widely used in the literature as it allows the intensity to be Markovian in the univariate case, as well as in the multivariate setting under some restrictions, see the next remark. The second one models a progressive excitation that reaches its highest level after a time $1/\beta_{i,j}$ , after this, the impact decreases towards zero.

Figure 4

Evolution of kernels through time.

3.2 Likelihood

The aim of this section is to detail the likelihood of the multivariate Hawkes model. This likelihood is known as for any counting process with stochastic intensity and can be found in related references such as Ozaki (Reference Ozaki1979); we still provide its computation here for sake of completeness. Note that we implement a “brute force” multidimensional optimisation for maximum likelihood estimation (using the “Nelder-Mead” algorithm from the “optim” function in R). There exists alternatives to this approach, for example, using a stochastic descent algorithm, see Jaisson (Reference Jaisson2015) and Bacry et al. (Reference Bacry, Mastromatteo and Muzy2015) for a general discussion on inference strategies in a high-dimensional framework in the context of financial applications. Let us consider that the processes are observed on a given interval $[0,\tau]$ .

Proposition 1. The log-likelihood of a multidimensional Hawkes process $\big(N^{(i)}\big)_{1\leq i \leq d}$ with baseline intensity $\big(\mu^{(i)}\big)_{1\leq i \leq d}$ and kernels $\big( \phi_{i,j}(t) = \alpha_{i,j} \exp\left(- \beta_{i,j} t \right)\big)_{ 1\leq i,j \leq d}$ is

(3) \begin{eqnarray} \log \mathcal{L} & = & - \sum_{i = 1}^{d} \int_{0}^\tau (\mu_s^{(i)}+\sum_{j=1}^d \int_0^s \alpha_{i,j} \exp\left(- \beta_{i,j} (s - u) \right) {{d}} N_u^{(j)}) {{d}} s\nonumber \\[5pt] && + \sum_{i = 1}^{d} \sum_{n =1}^{m_i} \log \left( \mu^{(i)}_{t^{(i)}_n} +\sum_{j=1}^d \int_0^{t^{(i)}_{n}} \alpha_{i,j} \exp\left(- \beta_{i,j} (t^{(i)}_{n} - s) \right) {{d}} N_s^{(j)} \right)\end{eqnarray}

where $(t_n^{(k)})_{1\leq n \leq m_k}$ are the $m_k$ times of event observed for each group $k \in \{1,...,d\}$ .

Proof of Proposition 1.

1. (i) For ease of presentation, let us start with the single group case ( $d=1$ ); we omit the group index for simplicity of notation. Note that calibrating such model on each single group amounts to specify $\phi_{i,j}\equiv 0$ for $i \neq j$ in Equation (1). We introduce the notation $\mathcal{H}_n=\{T_n=t_n,...,T_1=t_1\}$ the information on the first n times of event and add the conventions $\mathcal{H}_0=\emptyset$ and $T_0=0$ . Having observed the times $(t_n)_{1\leq n \leq m}$ , the likelihood can be written as (by abuse of notation we keep the $T_n$ ):

   \begin{equation*}\begin{split}\mathcal{L}&={\mathbb{P}}(\forall 1\leq n \leq m, T_n=t_n, \text{ and } T_{m+1}>\tau)\\[5pt] &={\mathbb{P}}( T_{m+1}>\tau \mid \mathcal{H}_m ) \prod_{n =1}^m {\mathbb{P}}(T_n=t_n \mid \mathcal{H}_{n-1})\\[5pt] &=\exp \left( - \int_{T_m}^\tau \lambda_s {{d}} s\right) \prod_{n =1}^m \exp \left( - \int_{T_{n-1}}^{T_n} \lambda_s {{d}} s\right) \lambda_{T_n}\\[5pt] &=\exp \left( - \int_{0}^\tau \lambda_s {{d}} s\right) \prod_{n =1}^m \lambda_{T_n}\end{split}\end{equation*}
   Then the log-likelihood can be written as
   (4) \begin{equation}\log \mathcal{L}= - \int_{0}^\tau \lambda_s {{d}} s + \sum_{n =1}^m \log \lambda_{T_n}=- \int_{0}^\tau \lambda_s {{d}} s+\int_0^\tau \log \lambda_s{{d}} N_s\end{equation}
   This is the standard log-likelihood for any counting process $(N_s)_{s \geq 0}$ with intensity process $(\lambda_s)_{s \geq 0}$ . It now remains to further specify it in the context of the model introduced in Equation (1), as
   (5) \begin{equation}\log \mathcal{L}= - \int_{0}^\tau \mu_s {{d}} s - \int_{0}^\tau \sum_{T_n < s} \phi(s-T_n) {{d}} s + \sum_{n=1}^m \log \left( \mu_{T_n}+ \sum_{k=1}^{n-1} \phi(T_n-T_k) \right)\end{equation}
   If we further specify the self-exciting map as $\phi(t)=\alpha \exp\left( - \beta t\right)$ , with non-negative $\alpha$ and $\beta$ in the present context, we obtain
   (6) \begin{eqnarray} \log \mathcal{L}(\mu,\alpha,\beta) & = & - \int_{0}^\tau \mu_s {{d}} s - \alpha \int_{0}^\tau \sum_{T_n < s} \exp \left(-\beta(s-T_n) \right) {{d}} s\nonumber\\ && + \sum_{n=1}^m \log \left( \mu_{T_n}+ \alpha \sum_{k=1}^{n-1} \exp \left(-\beta(T_n-T_k) \right) \right)\end{eqnarray}

2. (ii) In the multivariate setting, the parameters for all groups are gathered into a vector $M(t)=(\mu_t^{(1)},...,\mu_t^{(d)})$ , possibly time dependent, and two $d\times d$ matrices $A=\left( \alpha_{i,j} \right)_{1\leq i,j'\leq d}$ and $B=\left( \beta_{i,j} \right)_{1\leq i,j\leq d}$ . The multivariate intensity is fully specified in Equation (1), and using the same reasoning as above, we can derive the associated log-likelihood based on observation $((t_n^{(i)})_{1 \leq n \leq m_i})_{1 \leq i \leq d}$

   (7) \begin{align} \log \mathcal{L}(M(.), A, B) & = - \sum_{i = 1}^{d} \int_{0}^\tau \lambda_s^{(i)}{{d}} s + \sum_{i = 1}^{d} \sum_{n =1}^{m_i} \log \lambda^{(i)}_{t^{(i)}_n}\nonumber \\[5pt] & = - \sum_{i = 1}^{d} \int_{0}^\tau \left(\mu_s^{(i)}+\sum_{j=1}^d \int_0^s \phi_{i,j}(s-u) {{d}} N_u^{(j)}\right) {{d}} s \\[5pt] &\quad + \sum_{i = 1}^{d} \sum_{n =1}^{m_i} \log\left(\mu^{(i)}_{t^{(i)}_n}+\sum_{j=1}^d \int_0^{t^{(i)}_{n}} \phi_{i,j}(t^{(i)}_{n}-s) {{d}} N_s^{(j)}\right)\nonumber\end{align}
   When specifying the self- and mutually exciting maps $\phi_{i,j}(t) = \alpha_{i,j} \exp\left(- \beta_{i,j} t \right)$ , the final log-likelihood is given by Equation (3).

4.1 Segmentation

The aim of our study is to calibrate a multivariate Hawkes process on several groups obtained by crossing the covariates: Type of breach and Type of the covered entity and State. These covariates are those discussed in section 2 and Tables 1, 2 and in Appendix Table A. In particular, we use the aggregated covariates as discussed in section 2.2. In order to have sufficiently represented groups, we kept the largest ones and removed others in the OTHER group. We also put the group MED and OTHER and OTHER in the OTHER group because it was to irregular over the period of interest. This is summarised in Table 3.^{Footnote 2}

Table 3.

Studied groups.

Figure 5 shows the frequency of attacks over the calibration period (2011–2016). First, the different trends strengthen our idea that this segmentation could indeed make sense. These trends will be taken into account through a dedicated linear specification in the baseline intensity. Furthermore, the clustering behaviour of the data breach occurrences appear, alternating high- and low-activity periods, see in particular MED and DISC and OTHER (2) and MED and HACK and OTHER (4).

Figure 5

Numbers of attacks function of the time (in days) for each of the six groups.

4.2 Models studied

Maximum likelihood inference has been performed for the three following kernels:

(8) \begin{eqnarray} &&\text{Kernel 1: } \phi_{i,j}(t) =\alpha_{i,j}\exp(-\beta_{i}t)\nonumber\\[4pt] && \text{Kernel 2: } \phi_{i,j}(t) =\alpha_{i,j}\exp(-\beta_{i,j}t)\\[4pt] && \text{Kernel 3: } \phi_{i,j}(t) = \alpha_{i,j}t\exp(-\beta_{i}t)\nonumber\end{eqnarray}

In order to take into account possible trends in the dynamics, as depicted in Figure 5, a linear baseline intensity $(\mu^{(i)}_s)_{s \geq 0}$ has been specified as:

\begin{equation*}\mu^{(i)}_s= \mu^{(i)}_{0}+\gamma_{i} s\end{equation*}

with $\mu^{(i)}_{0} \geq 0, \gamma_{i} \in \mathbb{R}$ for $i \in \{1,...,d\}$ . Note that in case of a negative trend, the parameters are constrained such that the baseline intensity remains positive at the end of the 1-year forecasting period, that is, for each $i \in \{1,...,d\}$ ,

(9) \begin{equation}\mu^{(i)}_{0}+\gamma_{i} (\tau + 1) > 0\end{equation}

This leads, in total, to a number of 54 parameters for kernels 1 and 3, and 84 parameters for kernel 2. Section 4.4 tests a Lasso method to reduce the dimension.

Recall that the first two kernels (exponential case) cause an instantaneous jump of the intensity when an event occur, and then the impact decreases exponentially towards zero (the decrease speed is different for each pair (i, j) in the second case). The third kernel reaches its highest level after a time $1/\beta_{i}$ and then the impact decreases towards zero.

4.3 Inference

The likelihood obtained through the inference process is provided in Table 4.

Table 4.

Opposite of the log-likelihood for each kernel. The largest likelihood are highlighted in bold.

Among the three kernels tested, see Equation (8), it appears that the use of kernel 2 with more parameters provides a better likelihood estimate compared to kernel 1, as expected. However, a key result is that kernel 3 with non-instantaneous excitation provides a better fit than kernel 2, with less parameters. Before detailing the parameter estimates and their interpretation, we present in the following the adequacy test performed.

Adequacy test. We use a statistical test of goodness of fit to evaluate the quality of adjustment of the model. One classical test in the theory of point processes uses the following result, which follows from Theorem 4.1 of Garcia & Kurtz (Reference Garcia and Kurtz2008). Note first that this requires the intensity to remain positive, which is ensured by Equation (9). Remark also that Theorem 4.1 in Garcia & Kurtz (Reference Garcia and Kurtz2008) holds for general counting processes, beyond the class of Hawkes processes.

Proposition 2. Let us define for any $i \in \{1,...,d\}$ and $k\geq1$ ,

\begin{equation*}\tau_{k}^{(i)}=\int_{0}^{T_{k}^{(i)}} \lambda_t^{(i)} d t\end{equation*}

Then, the $(\tau_{k}^{(i)})_{k\geq 1}$ are the jump times of an homogeneous Poisson process of intensity 1.

This result provides a way to test the adequacy of the Hawkes processes: if the underlying process is indeed a Hawkes process with this intensity, the times

\begin{equation*}\theta_{k}^{(i)} = \tau_{k}^{(i)}-\tau_{k-1}^{(i)}, \text{ } k\geq1\end{equation*}

are independent and distributed according to an exponential distribution with parameter. 1. We can then assess the adequacy for each group $i \in \{1,...,d\}$ of the time series $(\theta_{k}^{(i)})_{k \geq 1}$ to the exponential distribution with a standard Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. This test is based on comparing the distance between the empirical cumulative distribution and that of a reference specified distribution (here exponential) with known parameters (here 1). The adequacy tests for the different kernels are summarised in Table 5. The cases where the null hypothesis (adequacy) is not rejected at confidence level 5 % are highlighted in bold.

Table 5.

Adequacy test.

From these tests, it appears that the adequacy is satisfactory except for group MED and HACK and OTHER (4), whatever the kernel considered.

Given the quality of the adequacy and of the likelihood presented by kernel 3 ( $\phi_{i,j}(t) = \alpha_{i,j}t\exp(-\beta_{i}t)$ ), we focus on this kernel for the parameter interpretation which follows.

Parameter estimates – Kernel 3. The parameter estimates for kernel 3 are detailed in Tables 6 and 7; they are interpreted in the following.

Table 6.

Parameters $(\mu_0^{(i)})_{1\leq i \leq 6}$ , $(\beta_{i})_{1\leq i \leq 6}$ and $(\gamma_{i})_{1\leq i \leq 6}$ .

Table 7.

Parameters $(\alpha_{i,j})_{1\leq i,j \leq 6}$ .

To further analyse the parameters, we also compute in Table 8 the maximum value $\Gamma_{i,j}$ of the influence of an event of group j on the intensity of the group i (for $1\leq i,j \leq d$ ). This maximum influence is reached after a certain time, as specified before, up to the value $\Gamma_{i,j}\,\coloneqq \,\frac{\alpha_{i,j}}{\beta_{i}} e^{-1}$ .

Table 8.

Maximum excitations $(\Gamma_{i,\,j})_{1\leq i,\,j \leq 6}$ .

Finally, the ratio $\Big(\frac{\Gamma_{i,j}}{\mu_0^{(i)}}\Big)_{1\leq i,j \leq 6}$ between the maximum excitation and the baseline intensity is provided in Table 9. This ratio helps to understand the relative importance of the excitation phenomenon compared to the baseline dynamics.

Table 9.

Ratios between the maximum excitation and the baseline intensity $\left(\frac{\Gamma_{i,j}}{\mu_0^{(i)}}\right)_{1\leq i,j \leq 6}$ . The largest values are highlighted in bold.

Interpretation. A possible interpretation is the following.

The baseline intensity $\mu_{0}$ is highest for groups 1 (OTHER) and 6 (MED and THEFT/LOSS and OTHER), which simply reflects the fact that they are more represented. This link is not always verified, for example, groups 2 (MED and DISC and OTHER) and 4 (MED and HACK and OTHER) seem to owe their number of attacks more to excitation phenomena than group 3 (Businesses and HACK and OTHER) because they are more represented but do not have a higher base rate ( $\mu_{0}^{(2)}<\mu_{0}^{(3)}$ and $\mu_{0}^{(4)}<\mu_{0}^{(3)})$ .

Concerning the drifts, the model seems to have captured the trends visible in Figure 5, they are all decreasing ( $\gamma < 0$ ) except for segments 2 and 4. Segments 3 and 5 (MED and THEFT/LOSS and CALIFORNIA) have very low-trend parameters, which also correspond to the histograms.

Table 9 represents the maximum value of excitation $\Gamma_{i,j}$ , relatively to the basic intensity $\mu_0^{(i)}$ . For $1\leq i,j \leq d$ , the coefficient $\Gamma_{i,j}=\frac{\alpha_{i,j}}{\beta_{i}} e^{-1}$ represents the maximum value of the influence of an event in group j, on the intensity of the group i, and $\mu_0^{(i)}$ is the constant component of the baseline intensity of group i. Table 9 shows a strong self-excitation of groups 2 and 4, which corresponds to the remark made in the paragraph on baseline intensity, and this is also the case for group 5 ( $\Gamma_{i,i} >> \mu_0^{(i)}$ for $i=2, 4$ and 5). The OTHER group is the least self-excited ( $\Gamma_{1.1}<\mu_0^{(1)})$ . The different types of attacks for the medical sector seem to excite each other, attacks of type HACK and DISC have a clear impact on the intensity of the other and they also trigger attacks of type THEFT/LOSS. On the other hand, attacks THEFT/LOSS do not seem to have a significant impact on the other two.

Concerning the coefficients $(\beta_{i})_{1 \leq i \leq 6}$ , they are all of the same order of magnitude except for the group BUSINESSES and HACK and OTHER which is higher; this means that the excitation phenomenon is less strong and vanishes quickly for this group. More specifically, the $(\beta_{i})_{1\leq i \leq 6}$ parameters for this kernel 3 indicate that the maximal excitation is globally reached after approximately 4 or 5 hours ( $\frac{1}{\beta_i}$ for $\beta_i$ varying from 5.4 to 7.3).

From an actuarial perspective, the model parameter estimates allow first to identify sub-groups of entities and related insurance covers (groups 2 and 4 mainly, and 5 to a lesser extent) which still present a strong self-excitation despite that the joint dynamics with the other groups is captured. This means that for actuarial applications (pricing, reserving), the recourse to self-exciting models such as Hawkes processes cannot be avoided to appropriately quantify the frequency risk of these groups.

In addition, we have seen that different types of attacks in the medical sector interact with each other. This involves that an actuarial assessment possibly focusing on a specific guarantee (like theft/loss) will gain if other types of data losses are also involved in the modelling, even if not covered by the insurance contract; this is, for example, the case of unintended disclosure which has to be modelled since it is a strong explanatory driver to understand the pattern of the theft/loss risk.

These insights are even more important for actuaries when they derive capital requirements related to cyber risk uncertainty. Indeed, the identification of the self-exciting and mutually exciting behaviours helps to refine the full distribution of the risk, again even if only a few set of entity types and covers (attack types) are of interest among those modelled.

4.4 Penalised likelihood

A first motivation in calibrating Hawkes processes is the natural interpretation given by the parameters. However, the number of parameters, and therefore the complexity, increases rapidly with the dimension of the Hawkes process. One way to reduce complexity consists in penalising the likelihood with the norm of the vector of parameters. This penalisation should shrink the potential values taken by the parameters. In our case, we decided to penalise the $(\alpha_{i,j})_{1\leq i,j\leq d}$ parameters with the $\mathbb{L}_{1}$ -norm ^{Footnote 3} (Lasso method). Indeed, this choice should highlight the main interactions between the groups and provide parameter estimates with lower variance (at the price of an increase in the bias). One could have chosen instead an $\mathbb{L}_{2}$ -norm penalisation (Ridge method), that also shrinks the coefficients of less contributing variables towards zero, but without setting any of them exactly to zero. We therefore want to minimise the penalised log-likelihood

\begin{equation*}-\log \mathcal{L}(M(.), A, B)_{\text{penalised}} = -\log \mathcal{L}(M(.), A, B) + \nu \sum_{1\leq i,j\leq d} |\alpha_{i,j}| \end{equation*}

where $\nu \geq 0$ is the penalisation coefficient, and $\mathcal{L}(M(.), A, B)$ is the likelihood of the Hawkes process. Different values of the coefficient $\nu$ will be tested, in order to observe how the estimated parameters react, and how the predictive capacity evolves. Let us recall that increasing the value of $\nu$ will increase the bias and decrease the variance of the predictions. In our experiment, we observe that the $\beta$ parameters compensate the penalty constraint on the $\alpha$ parameters, and therefore, no parameters are forced to zero. This flexibility would be deleted if we would have extended the penalty to the $\beta$ parameters as well; in such a case, we expect we would have obtained the classical vanishing results of some coefficients, at the price of an expected decrease in the prediction capacity.

The following penalisation parameters have been tested, for the three kernels considered (see Section 4.2) : $\nu \in \{0, 100, 600, 900, 3000, 6000\}$ .

Table 10 shows that likelihood values are not too damaged up to a penalisation coefficient of 900. Recall that kernel 3 has a better likelihood (with no penalisation) than kernel 2, and this indicates that our data are better represented with a latent excitation than an instantaneous one. Moreover, kernel 3 has a better likelihood than kernel 2 even if it is a more sparing model (54 parameters versus 84 parameters).

Table 10.

Values of the opposites of the log-likelihood functions for each penalty coefficient – the upper line corresponds to the $\nu$ coefficient.

The analysis of the penalisation in terms of prediction will be assessed in the next section.

4.5 Predictions

4.5.1 Computation of the mean predicted number of attacks

In order to compare the different calibrations, we study the gap between the expectation of the calibrated process and the real number of attacks. In Appendix B, we detail the computation for the expectation of a multivariate Hawkes process, for the three types of kernels considered in Equation (8). Recall that we are concerned by the non-stationary framework as we have chosen a temporal drift for our baseline intensity. It extends previous results of Boumezoued (Reference Boumezoued2016) for which computations are done for non-stationary univariate Hawkes processes with a wide class of kernels. We thus compute the average expected number of events on a given period $\mathbb{E}[N_{t}^{(i)}\mid\mathcal{F}_{t_0}],\text{ } t_0 < t$ , for the calibrated set of parameters. The numerical results are given in the first columns of Table 11, for different values $\nu$ of the Lasso penalty coefficient. It is compared with the real number of attacks of the PRC database in the last column.

Table 11.

Sum of the mean predicted number of attacks over each segment.

Table 12.

Sum of the absolute differences between the expected number of attacks predicted (in 2016 and 2017) and the real number, over the six segments.

4.5.2 Results

Table 11 shows that an overestimated number of attacks on one segment could be “compensated” by an underestimated number on another segment. To provide a more detailed estimation of the errors in prediction, segment by segment, Table 12 computes the sum (over the six segments) of the absolute differences between the expected number of attacks predicted and the real number.

Tables 11 and 12 show that a penalty can improve the predictive capacities of the model, to a certain extent, this is the case, for example, for kernels 1 and 2 for the year 2016. Kernel 2 seems to be better improved by a penalisation, which is in line with the fact that it is the less parsimonious (84 parameters). We observe in our experiment that as a large penalty coefficient makes the model closer to a Poisson process (without auto-excitation), it is compensated with a larger baseline intensity $\mu$ , which explains the worsening of the prediction when $\nu$ becomes too large. Kernel 2 is less sensible to this degradation since the $\beta_{i,j}$ can also compensate a too strong penalisation on the $\alpha_{i,j}$ . It also appears that the classical trade-off train/test is difficult here, since the best predictions of 2017 are not made by the best models of 2016.

Figure 6

Distribution of the number of attacks predicted for 2016 with kernel 3 – in red the real number, in blue the 0.5% and 99.5% quantiles of the predicted distribution.

Figure 7

Distribution of the number of attacks predicted for 2017 with kernel 3 – in red the real number, in blue the 0.5% and 99.5% quantiles of the predicted distribution.

The model with kernel 3 ( $\phi_{i,j}(t) = \alpha_{i,j}t\exp(-\beta_{i}t)$ ) and no penalisation seems to be a good compromise in terms of predictions over the 2 years. This model appears to be the most reliable since it is also the one with the best likelihood.

4.8 Predictions of the whole distribution of the number of attacks

We use the so-called thinning algorithm in order to simulate trajectories of Hawkes processes that are projections of a Hawkes process with past occurrences corresponding to the historical data. A detailed discussion on the thinning procedure for Hawkes processes is given in section 4 of Boumezoued (Reference Boumezoued2016). The histograms of predictions based on 10,000 simulations are depicted in Figures 6 and 7. These distributions could be used to determine a 99.5% percentile at a 1-year horizon in the context of a Solvency II internal model. The distributions seem to capture the main trends, excepted for two cases in 2016 and one case in 2017. Besides, we note a tendency for the model to underestimate the number of attacks, this is a feature of exponential kernels (that decrease very fast) that has already been pointed out by Hardiman et al. (Reference Hardiman, Bercot and Bouchaud2013) in a financial framework for modelling order books. The projection for group OTHER (group 1) is particularly bad, due to the lack of structure of this “catch-all” group.

Finally, the model with kernel 3 seems to capture a significant part of the dynamics, with a reasonable number of parameters. Due to the heterogeneity of the PRC data set, it is impossible to work globally on the whole data set, so we have split in different groups. The choice of the different groups, which should be more homogeneous as possible, is determinant in the prediction accuracy, as illustrated by the group OTHER that performs very badly. The advantage of our approach is that this joint mutually exciting model focuses on the whole joint distribution of numbers of attacks for each group, which is more accurate – but also more complex – than modelling marginal distributions, group per group. It thus allows to globally analyse the arrival of events, given some characteristics (type of the breached entity, type of breach and localisation). A counterpart of this joint model is that a lower fitting accuracy for a given group may propagate to other groups.

Besides, part of the discrepancy observed in Figures 6 and 7 is also due to the variation of the underlying exposure that inevitably impacts the number of attacks and the accuracy of the predictions. Although it is very difficult to assess the exposure for such a public data set, an insurer could enrich this joint mutually exciting model using its own data on exposure, which could then be integrated within the baseline intensity of the Hawkes processes (e.g. taking a baseline intensity proportional to the exposure).