| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 統計研究所 === 95 === The mortality rates in Taiwan area have been experiencing dramatic decreases in recent years. The life expectancy has surpassed that in the United States in 2000 and Taiwan has become one of the longevity countries. Besides, the falling of mortality rates varies in different age, period, and cohort groups, which corresponds to the APC (Age-Period-Cohort) model. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to study the mortality rates in Taiwan area with APC model. However, due to the linear dependency of age, period and cohort (Period = Age + Cohort), there is the identification problem, that is, the parameter estimates are not unique.
A number of solutions to the identification problem in APC model have been provided in the literature. Fu (2000) introduce a new estimator, the Intrinsic Estimator (IE), which can solve parameter estimates and variance directly. In the first part of this research, computer simulation is conducted to examine the IE, compared with other methodologies. In the second part of this research, data from 1961 to 2005 are used for verifying the validity of APC model in fitting mortality rates, and we analyze the strengths and weaknesses between the APC and Lee-Carter model.
The results from our study indicate that the APC model in estimating mortality rates does not show as well as the Lee-Carter model as a whole. However, the APC model performs better than the Lee-Carter model for the elderly mortality rates, but is still needed to be improved in young groups. In the future, it can be considered to combine the APC and Lee-Carter model.
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