• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Mortality forecasting with an age-coherent sparse VAR model
  • Contributor: Li, Hong [Author]; Shi, Yanlin [Author]
  • Published: Basel: MDPI, 2021
  • Language: English
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/risks9020035
  • ISSN: 2227-9091
  • Keywords: age coherent ; elastic net regularization ; vector autoregressive ; mortality forecasting
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  • Description: This paper proposes an age-coherent sparse Vector Autoregression mortality model, which combines the appealing features of existing VAR-based mortality models, to forecast future mortality rates. In particular, the proposed model utilizes a data-driven method to determine the autoregressive coefficient matrix, and then employs a rotation algorithm in the projection phase to generate age-coherent mortality forecasts. In the estimation phase, the age-specific mortality improvement rates are fitted to a VAR model with dimension reduction algorithms such as the elastic net. In the projection phase, the projected mortality improvement rates are assumed to follow a short-term fluctuation component and a long-term force of decay, and will eventually converge to an age-invariant mean in expectation. The age-invariance of the long-term mean guarantees age-coherent mortality projections. The proposed model is generalized to multi-population context in a computationally efficient manner. Using single-age, uni-sex mortality data of the UK and France, we show that the proposed model is able to generate more reasonable long-term projections, as well as more accurate short-term out-of-sample forecasts than popular existing mortality models under various settings. Therefore, the proposed model is expected to be an appealing alternative to existing mortality models in insurance and demographic analyses.
  • Access State: Open Access
  • Rights information: Attribution (CC BY)