Age heaping in population data of emerging countries

Abstract

Mortality analyses have commonly focused on countries represented in the Human Mortality Database that have good quality mortality data. In this thesis, we address the challenge that, in many countries, population and deaths data can be somewhat unreliable. In many countries, for example, there is significant misreporting of age in both census and deaths data: referred to as “age heaping”. The purpose of our research is to develop Bayesian computational methods for fitting a new model for misreporting of age for countries where their population data and death counts have been affected by age heaping. The innovation of our model is that it allows us to detect misreporting, identify age preferences and estimate the true underlying distribution of ages.