Eliciting Subjective Survival Curves: Lessons from Partial Identification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When analyzing subjective expectations, researchers commonly apply (non-)parametric approximations to point identify beliefs. We propose a new take on this type of data that does not impose a functional form on expectations. Using the widely researched example of subjective survival expectations, we construct bounds for subjective sur- vival curves. These bounds allow us to partially identify subjective life expectancy. We show that the informativeness of the bounds depends on our willingness to interpolate beliefs between data points. If we do not smooth between the elicited points on the survival functions, the bounds are too wide for useful inference. However, if we do interpolate and allow for a limited amount of rounding, the resulting bounds are nar- row enough to show variation in life expectancy with age and self-reported health, the strongest predictors in point identi ed models. Finally, we match the subjective data to life tables. While analysis that point identi es life expectancy, either parametri- cally or non-parametrically, rejects consistency of expectations with actuarial forecasts for women, the bounds show that allowing for rounding renders the subjective data consistent with forecasts on average.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".