An alternative procedure to obtain the mortality rate with non-linear functions: Application to the case of the Spanish population

Marcos Postigo-Boix, Ramón Agüero and José L Melús-Moreno

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 10, 1-16

Abstract: This paper presents an alternative calculation procedure to calculate the mortality rate, exploiting the data available in the Eurostat demography database for Spain. This methodology has been devised based on two of the most widely known and widespread models to establish the mortality rate: The Gompertz-Makeham (GM) and Lee-Carter (LC) models. Our main goal is to obtain a model yielding a similar accuracy than LC or GM, but able to capture the variation of their parameters over time and ages. The method proposed herewith works by applying simple or double fitting, with non-linear functions, to the values of the parameters considered by each one of such models. One of the main advantages of our approach is that we considerably reduce the amount of data that is required to establish the mortality rate, with respect to what would be needed if the traditional models were used. On the other hand, it also allows analyzing the evolution of the mortality rate, even if no real data was available for a particular year. The results evince that, besides fulfilling the two aforementioned goals, the proposed scheme yields an estimation error that is comparable with that offered by the traditional approach.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223789 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 23789&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0223789

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0223789

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).