Phase-type (PH) distributions are defined as distributions of lifetimes of finite continuous-time Markov processes. Their traditional applications are in queueing, insurance risk, and reliability, but more recently, also in finance and, though to a lesser extent, to life and health insurance....

The authors replicate and extend the Monte Carlo experiment presented in Doz et al. (2012) on alternative (time-domain based) methods for extracting dynamic factors from large datasets; they employ open source software and consider a larger number of replications and a wider set of scenarios....