Abstract
In demography mortality is usually reported through averages over time intervals. If average mortality is estimated from censored or truncated data, then direct methods of estimation may create biases that depend on the censoring or truncation distribution. Such discretization errors may be avoided by estimating survival curves first in continuous time, and then discretizing the estimators. We illustrate the different methods on data of the form obtained from family reconstitution.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blum, A. 1989. An estimate of local adult mortality based on family cards.Population 44: 23–38.
Jonker, M.A. and A.W. van der Vaart. In press. Bias correction in historical demography.Population Studies.
Kaplan, E.L. and P. Meier. 1958. Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations.Journal of the American Statistical Association 53: 457–481.
Peterson, A.V. 1977. Expressing the Kaplan-Meier estimator as a function of empirical subsurvival functions.Journal of the American Statistical Association 72: 854–858.
Ruggles, S. 1992. Migration, marriage, and mortality: correcting sources of bias in English family reconstitutions.Population Studies 46: 507–522.
van der Vaart, A.W. 1998.Asymptotic Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wrigley, E.A., R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen and R.S. Schofield. 1997.English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jonker, M.A., van der Vaart, A.W. Estimation of average mortality under censoring and truncation. Journal of Population Research 22, 49–62 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03031803
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03031803