The Risk and Stochastics Group (RSG) was founded at the London School of Economics in 2004 and is based in the School's Department of Statistics. It manifests the department's increasingly prominent role as a hotbed of research and education in stochastics and its applications in insurance and finance.
The RSG is an international network whose core are members of the Statistics Department and whose associates are outside experts connected to the core through academic collaboration. Its structure is horizontal.
Members have been brought together by their academic interest in risk and stochastics and the collective cause of conducting research in the area, and disseminating its results through education and contacts with relevant industrial partners, regulators and bodies representing the public interest.
The group is collaborating closely with LSE's Financial Markets Group, with similar groups in other universities and with the Institute of Actuaries.
Risk and Stochastics, idea and language, are inseparable. Scientific inquiry into Risk could not happen without the sophisticated concepts, vocabulary, and analytical tools of Stochastics. And the great advances in Stochastics could not happen without the fertilising effects of its applications in risk theory and countless other areas. The dazzling beauty of Stochastics is a sufficient reason for studying it, but its immense powers make it a necessity to anyone who ventures to analyse risk management through insurance and financial operations of ever increasing complexity and sophistication. Hence the name of the group.
Research is the source of drive and influence of any academic enterprise. The research activities of the RSG, reflecting both our unifying leitmotif and our diversity, range vertically from basic research to applied research and horizontally over a vast list of topics. The research| page describes our current research activities.
Academic education emanates from, and is inextricably related to, research. The teaching activities of the RSG serve the combined purpose of giving specialist training of immediate social utility and - following the Humboldt model - of equipping the students to acquire advanced knowledge and to build on and expand that knowledge. Descriptions of the programmes conducted by the group are given on the education| page.
The activities of the RSG include the regular Risk and Stochastics Seminar and the annual Risk and Stochastics Day, serving to disseminate advances in science and also furthering contacts between researchers and practitioners.