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Record W4285082548 · doi:10.2105/ajph.2022.306805

The (Im)precision of Life Expectancy Numbers

2022· article· en· W4285082548 on OpenAlexafffund
James A. Hanley

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Journal of Public Health · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicGlobal Health Care Issues
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health Research
KeywordsLife expectancyDecimalPublic healthPopulationJackknife resamplingDemographyStatisticsPsychologyEconometricsGerontologyMathematicsMedicineArithmeticSociologyEstimator

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Life expectancy figures for countries and population segments are increasingly being reported to more decimal places and used as indicators of the strengths or failings of countries’ health and social systems. Reports seldom quantify their intrinsic statistical imprecision or the age-specific numbers of deaths that determine them. The SE formulas available to compute imprecision are all model based. This note adds a more intuitive data-based SE method and extends the jackknife to the analysis of event rates more generally. It also describes the relationships between the magnitude of the SE and the numbers of person-years and deaths on which it is based. These relationships can help quantify the statistical noise present in published year-to-year differences in life expectancies, as well as in same-year differences between or within countries. Agencies and investigators are encouraged to use one of these SEs to report the imprecision of life expectancy numbers and to tailor the number of decimal places accordingly. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(8):1151–1160. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306805 )

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.052
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.302
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.052
Threshold uncertainty score0.276

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0520.302
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0050.006
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0070.006
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.004

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.

Opus teacher head0.084
GPT teacher head0.454
Teacher spread0.370 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2022
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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