Wilkie Models

See also: The Wilkie model, Time series in ModelRisk, the Vose Time Series window

Introduction

The Wilkie Models window from ModelRisk

The Wilkie Model - named after A.D. Wilkie - models the behavior of various economic series over time. As it is currently widely being used in actuarial work.

For a detailed explanation about Wilkie models see the Wilkie models topic.

To see the output functions of this window, click here.

Window elements

Output

Each of these takes a certain set of parameters, which can be inserted manually by typing in the appropriate field, or dynamically link to a value in a spreadsheet.

The output to your spreadsheet will be a number of columns equal to the number of selected models.

Check the Show Descriptions checkbox to have the name of each Wilkie Model on top of its column with generated values.

Models

The Models pane in the Wilkie Models window.

In the models pane (shown in the image on the right), you can select what models to generate data for. For each selected model, some summary data are shown. The Wilkie models to choose from are:

• Price Inflation

• Wage Inflation

• Share Yields

• Dividends

• Long Term Rate

• Short Term Rate

Wilkie models graphs

In the middle pane, the graphs with generated lines from (only) the selected Wilkie model(s) are shown.

To save screen space, the toolbar for Wilkie models graphs is hidden by default. While this might give the impression less customization is allowed, the opposite is actually true: you can customize each graph shown seperately!

By right-clicking anywhere in the graph area, you are presented a context menu from which you can hide/unhide the toolbar, change the color of the item selected, add/change the graphs title, point labels, font and show the advanced display properties (3D, border, gridlines...).

The buttons on a graph toolbar allow you to, from left to right:

• Copy the graph to the windows clipboard (choose As a bitmap to paste the graph in any other Windows application)

• Print the graph

• Choose the type of graph used. By default, a line graph is selected, but other types like histogram can be chosen if so desired.

• Switch anti-aliasing (i.e. smoothing out "blocky"-looking lines by making them more "blurry") on/off.

• Change the colour palette used. By default, generated lines are blue or green and the background white.

• Switch between a 2D/3D graph

• Zoom in on an area: select this button and drag a rectangle on the graph to zoom in to it.

When you hold your mouse pointer on a line, it comes "in focus" and all other visible elements are greyed out, for easily pointing somebody to a certain line.