Abstract
We thank Holger Rootzén and Dmitrii Zholud’s for their stimulating work, that led us to further investigate the problem of best fitting the human life span distribution. Their assertion “human life is unlimited but short” is based on their conclusion that the exponential model is the best to fit. We provide results based on standard Extreme Value approaches, the Block Maxima and Peaks-over-Threshold, and on the whole data available in the IDL database (IDL A, B validations and GRG). We verify that negative values for the extreme value index are more likely, supporting the conclusion that models with finite endpoint seem better to fit to the human life span distribution.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Laurens de Haan, Ross Maller and Sidney Resnick for their careful reading and comments, and Thomas Mikosch for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion.
This research was partially funded by FCT - Fundacão para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, UID/MAT/00006/2013 and UID/Multi/04621/2013.
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Ferreira, A., Huang, F. Is human life limited or unlimited? (A discussion of the paper by Holger Rootzén and Dmitrii Zholud). Extremes 21, 373–382 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10687-018-0318-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10687-018-0318-8
Keywords
- Peaks-Over-Threshold (POT)
- Block Maxima (BM)
- Human lifespan distribution
- Extreme value index and endpoint estimation