DONDENA Seminar - Hanlin Shang

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“Modeling Age Distribution of Death Counts: A Tale of Transformation” 

SPEAKER: Hanlin Shang (Macquarie University) 

ABSTRACT: 

Like density functions, period life-table death counts are nonnegative and have a constrained integral, and thus live in a constrained nonlinear space. Implementing established modelling and forecasting methods without obeying these constraints can be problematic for such nonlinear data. We introduce cumulative distribution function transformation to forecast the life-table death counts. Using the Japanese life-table death counts obtained from the Japanese Mortality Database (2024), we evaluate the point and interval forecast accuracies of the proposed approach, which compares favourably to an existing compositional data analytic approach. The improved forecast accuracy of life-table death counts is of great interest to demographers for estimating age-specific survival probabilities and life expectancy and actuaries for determining temporary annuity prices for different ages and maturities. 
 

BIO:
 
Hanlin Shang is a Professor at the Department of Actuarial Studies and Business Analytics at Macquarie University. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2025 to 2028. His research interests include functional time series forecasting, empirical finance, actuarial studies, and demographic forecasting. His publications include articles in the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, ASTIN Bulletin, Population Studies, and Demographic Research. He serves as a co-editor for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics and an associate editor for the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Demographic Research, Computational Statistics, International Journal of Forecasting and Forecasting.