Optimizing the Lee-Carter Approach in the Presence of Structural Changes in Time and Age Patterns of Mortality Improvements
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers using the Lee-Carter approach have often assumed that the time-varying index evolves linearly and that the parameters describing the age pattern of mortality decline are time-invariant. However, as several empirical studies suggest, the two assumptions do not seem to hold when the calibration window begins too early. This problem gives rise to the question of identifying the longest calibration window for which the two assumptions hold true. To address this question, we contribute a likelihood ratio-based sequential test to jointly test whether the two assumptions are satisfied. Consistent with the mortality structural changes observed in previous studies, our testing procedure indicates that the starting points of the optimal calibration windows for most populations fall between 1960 and 1990. Using an out-of-sample analysis, we demonstrate that in most cases, models that are estimated to the optimized calibration windows result in more accurate forecasts than models that are fitted to all available data or data beyond 1950. We further apply the proposed testing procedure to data over different age ranges. We find that the optimal calibration windows for age group 0-49 are generally shorter than those for age group 50-89, indicating that mortality at younger ages might have undergone (another) structural change in recent years.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it