Abstract:

We propose a new parametric model for the life table distribution of deaths. The model is a mixture of three distributions: an Half Normal for infant and child mortality, a Skew Normal for accidental and premature mortality, and another Skew Normal for adult mortality. This allows to study the characteristics of the different components analysing the changes of the shape of their distributions. In particular we focused on the features of accidental and premature mortality, since this component, for several reasons, is not often taken into account. The model offers the advantage of computing, in explicit form, the three component’s contributions to life expectancy. This is useful to understand the transformations of the distribution of deaths. Moreover, all parameters in the model have a demographic interpretation, so it is easy to study trends and compare different populations. The mixture model was tested using Swedish raw data from the Human Mortality Database and then fitted for different countries.