A General Procedure for Constructing Mortality Models

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Amended 20 January 2015 Permanent repository link AbstractRecently, a large number of new mortality models have been proposed to analyse historical mortality rates and project them into the future. Many of these suffer from being over-parametrised or have terms added in an ad hoc manner which cannot be justified in terms of demographic significance. In addition, poor specification of a model can lead to period effects in the data being wrongly attributed to cohort effects which results in the model making implausible projections. We present a general procedure for constructing mortality models using a combination of a toolkit of functions and expert judgement. By following the general procedure, it is possible to identify sequentially every significant demographic feature in the data and give it a parametric structural form. We demonstrate using UK mortality data that the general procedure produces a relatively parsimonious model that nevertheless has a good fit to the data. * We are grateful to participants at a seminar at Cass

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