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.