Mortality data correction in the absence of monthly fertility records

Abstract

Since the conjecture of Richards (2008), the work by Cairns et al. (2016) and subsequent developments by Boumezoued (2020), Boumezoued et al. (2020) and Boumezoued et al. (2019), it has been acknowledged that observations from censuses have led to major problems of reliability in estimates of general population mortality rates as implemented in practice. These issues led to mis-interpretation of some key mortality characteristics in the past decades, including ”false cohort effects”. To overcome these issues, the exposure estimates for a given country can be corrected by using monthly fertility records. However, in the absence of birth-by-month data, the recent developments are not applicable. Therefore, this paper explores new solutions regarding the construction of mortality tables in this context, based on machine learning techniques. As a main result, it is demonstrated that the new exposure models proposed in this paper allow to provide correction with high quality and to improve the fitting of stochastic mortality models without a cohort component, as it is the case for the existing correction method based on monthly fertility data.