A General Age-Specific Mortality Model With an Example Indexed by Child Mortality or Both Child and Adult Mortality

Samuel J. Clark ()
Additional contact information
Samuel J. Clark: The Ohio State University

Demography, 2019, vol. 56, issue 3, No 15, 1159 pages

Abstract: Abstract The majority of countries in Africa and nearly one-third of all countries require mortality models to infer the complete age schedules of mortality that are required to conduct population estimates, projections/forecasts, and other tasks in demography and epidemiology. Models that relate child mortality to mortality at other ages are important because almost all countries have measures of child mortality. A general, parameterizable component model (SVD-Comp) of mortality is defined using the singular value decomposition and calibrated to the relationship between child or child/adult mortality and mortality at other ages in the observed mortality schedules of the Human Mortality Database. Cross-validation is used to validate the model, and the predictive performance of the model is compared with that of the log-quadratic (Log-Quad) model, which is designed to do the same thing. Prediction and cross-validation tests indicate that the child mortality–calibrated SVD-Comp is able to accurately represent the observed mortality schedules in the Human Mortality Database, is robust to the selection of mortality schedules used for calibration, and performs better than the Log-Quad model. The child mortality–calibrated SVD-Comp can be used where and when child mortality is available but mortality at other ages is unknown.

Keywords: Mortality; Model; SVD; HMD; SVD-Comp (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13524-019-00785-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:demogr:v:56:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s13524-019-00785-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-019-00785-3

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().