Plugin Infrastructure

[genedan]

Realistically, I think we will only be able to support the most common reserving techniques (chain ladder, bf, cape cod, etc.), and within those, the most common data manipulations found in actuarial literature. For example, with the expected loss technique there would be an infinite number of ways to derive the apriori loss ratio but out of the box, FASLR will just offer a few ways to calculate it.

Therefore, I would like to establish some kind of plugin ecosystem whereby people can create their own custom models that behave just like the ones that are included in the base installation of FASLR. Those wishing to contribute their models publicly can upload them to a special section of the website where people can download them.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this, and I think it will be some time until I can get around to it. What I do know is that it's possible, as inspiration for this comes from the add-on ecosystem for Anki, the flashcard app:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/

Anki also has a manual for those wishing to write their own add-ons, and I think we can do this at some point as well:

https://addon-docs.ankiweb.net/

Some resources I found are:

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/creating-and-discovering-plugins/
https://pluggy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooking