Modelling and forecasting adult age-at-death distributions

Ugofilippo Basellini and Carlo Giovanni Camarda

Population Studies, 2019, vol. 73, issue 1, 119-138

Abstract: Age-at-death distributions provide an informative description of the mortality pattern of a population but have generally been neglected for modelling and forecasting mortality. In this paper, we use the distribution of deaths to model and forecast adult mortality. Specifically, we introduce a relational model that relates a fixed ‘standard’ to a series of observed distributions by a transformation of the age axis. The proposed Segmented Transformation Age-at-death Distributions (STAD) model is parsimonious and efficient: using only three parameters, it captures and disentangles mortality developments in terms of shifting and compression dynamics. Additionally, mortality forecasts can be derived from parameter extrapolation using time-series models. We illustrate our method and compare it with the Lee–Carter model and variants for females in four high-longevity countries. We show that the STAD fits the observed mortality pattern very well, and that its forecasts are more accurate and optimistic than the Lee–Carter variants.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2018.1545918

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