Probabilistic Mortality Forecasting with Varying Age-Specific Survival Improvements

Abstract: We propose a probabilistic mortality forecasting model that can be applied to derive forecasts for populations with regular and irregular mortality developments. Our model (1) uses rates of mortality improvement to model dynamic age patterns of mortality change and it can (2) optionally complement the mortality trend of a country of interest with that of at least one reference country. Retrospective mortality forecasts for British and Danish women from 1991 to 2011 suggest that our model can generate smaller forecast errors than other widely accepted approaches like, for instance, the Lee-Carter model or the UN Bayesian approach.