Abstract
Life expectancy is an estimate of how long the average person might be expected to live and is most often quoted for an entire lifetime. Forecasting of future life expectancy is needed to plan for health and social services and pensions. This article attempts to propose the most appropriate time series model based on Box-Jenkins methodology to explain the behavior of Malaysia life expectancy at birth for the purpose of forecasting future life expectancy. Several autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were developed to model Malaysia life expectancy on data collected from year 1966 to year 2016. The data which separated by gender are provided by Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) on yearly basis. The results indicate that both ARIMA(1,1,1) and ARIMA(2,2,3) model performed well for both in-sample fitting and out-sample evaluation for male and female respectively with the least value of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE).
Highlights
Life expectancy is an estimate of how long the average person might be expected to live and often quoted for an entire lifetime
The results indicate that both autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)(1,1,1) and ARIMA(2,2,3) model performed well for both in-sample fitting and out-sample evaluation for male and female respectively with the least value of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE)
It was found that all the ARIMA models were capable of representing the life expectancy in a subsequent year with relative precision when these models have been used to produce out-of-sample prediction of the Malaysian life expectancy
Summary
Life expectancy is an estimate of how long the average person might be expected to live and often quoted for an entire lifetime. Life expectancy at birth is the number of years that a newborn baby would live if they experienced the death rates of the local population at the time of their birth, throughout their life. The life expectancy increased from an average of 29 to 73 years in 2019 (Department of Economic and Social Affairs [DESA], 2019). A gradually increasing pattern of life expectancy in Malaysia shows a decreasing trend of mortality rates in Malaysia. This shows that most Malaysian will live longer. Life expectancy is one of the important indicators in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 3 which is Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages (Department of Economic and Social Affairs [DESA], 2020)
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