Abstract
Mortality forecasting has always been a target of study by academics and practitioners. Since the introduction and rising significance of securitization of risk in mortality and longevity, more in-depth studies regarding mortality have been carried out to enable the fair pricing of such derivatives. In this article, a comparative analysis is performed on the mortality forecasting accuracy of four mortality models. The methodology employs the Age-Period-Cohort model, the Cairns-Blake-Dowd model, the classical Lee-Carter model and the Kou-Modified Lee-Carter model. The Kou-Modified Lee-Carter model combines the classical Lee-Carter with the Double Exponential Jump Diffusion model. This paper is the first study to employ the Kou model to forecast French mortality data. The dataset comprises death data of French males from age 0 to age 90, available for the years 1900–2015. The paper differentiates between two periods: the 1900–1960 period where extreme mortality events occurred for French males and the 1961–2015 period where no significant jump is observed. The Kou-modified Lee-Carter model turns out to give the best mortality forecasts based on the RMSE, MAE, MPE and MAPE metrics for the period 1900–1960 during which the two World Wars occurred. This confirms that the consideration of jumps and leptokurtic features conveys important information for mortality forecasting.
Highlights
Mortality modelling has become an increasingly significant area of interest among academics and researchers during the past few centuries
The Kou-modified Lee-Carter model turns out to give the best mortality forecasts based on the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Percentage Error (MPE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) metrics for the period 1900–1960 during which the two
Unlike the three other models, the Kou model was able to capture the jumps caused by the extreme events in the 1900–1938 period during which the World War I and the influenza epidemy occurred
Summary
Mortality modelling has become an increasingly significant area of interest among academics and researchers during the past few centuries. This interest mainly arose for the simple calculation of demographic and actuarial quantities, and the construction of life tables. Mortality and longevity derivatives are financial contracts which do not depend on an underlying asset but instead rely on the mortality of a group of insured individuals or pensioners. These contracts act as an effective hedge to mortality and longevity risks. To allow for a proper pricing technique, an appropriate stochastic process for mortality modelling has to be adopted to capture the uncertainty aspect of mortality
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