Smoothing, Decomposing and Forecasting Mortality Rates

Carlo G. Camarda () and Ugofilippo Basellini ()
Additional contact information
Carlo G. Camarda: Institut National d’Études Démographiques
Ugofilippo Basellini: Institut National d’Études Démographiques

European Journal of Population, 2021, vol. 37, issue 3, No 3, 569-602

Abstract: Abstract The Lee–Carter (LC) model represents a landmark paper in mortality forecasting. While having been widely accepted and adopted, the model has some limitations that hinder its performance. Some variants of the model have been proposed to deal with these drawbacks individually, none coped with them all at the same time. In this paper, we propose a Three-Component smooth Lee–Carter (3C-sLC) model which overcomes many of the issues simultaneously. It decomposes mortality development into childhood, early-adult and senescent mortality, which are described, individually, by a smooth variant of the LC model. Smoothness is enforced to avoid irregular patterns in projected life tables, and complexity in the forecasting methodology is unaltered with respect to the original LC model. Component-specific schedules are considered in projections, providing additional insights into mortality forecasts. We illustrate the proposed approach to mortality data for ten low-mortality populations. The 3C-sLC captures mortality developments better than a smooth improved version of the LC model, and it displays wider prediction intervals. The proposed approach provides actuaries, demographers, epidemiologists and social scientists in general with a unique and valuable tool to simultaneously smooth, decompose and forecast mortality.

Keywords: Mortality decomposition; Mortality forecasting; Smoothness; Rate of mortality improvement; Lee–Carter model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10680-021-09582-4 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:eurpop:v:37:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s10680-021-09582-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10680

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-021-09582-4

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Population is currently edited by Helga A.G. de Valk

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