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MortalityLaws: Parametric Mortality Models, Life Tables and HMD

Fit the most popular human mortality laws, and construct full and abridged life tables given various input indices. A mortality law is a parametric function that describes the dying-out process of individuals in a population during a significant portion of their life spans. For a comprehensive review of the most important mortality laws see Tabeau (2001). Function for downloading demographic data from the following sources are provided:

Installation

Make sure you have the most recent version of R
Run the following code in your R console

install.packages("MortalityLaws")

Updating to the latest version of the package

You can track and contribute to the development of MortalityLaws on GitHub. To install it:

Install the release version of devtools from CRAN with install.packages("devtools").
Make sure you have a working development environment.
- Windows: Install Rtools.
- Mac: Install Xcode from the Mac App Store.
- Linux: Install a compiler and various development libraries (details vary across different flavors of Linux).

Install the development version of MortalityLaws.

devtools::install_github("mpascariu/MortalityLaws")

Help

All functions are documented in the standard way, which means that once you load the package using library(MortalityLaws) you can just type ?MortalityLaw to see the help file.

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Version

Install

install.packages('MortalityLaws')

Monthly Downloads

716

Version

2.1.3

License

MIT + file LICENSE

Issues

Pull Requests

Stars

Forks

Repository

https://github.com/mpascariu/MortalityLaws

Maintainer

Marius Pascariu

Last Published

April 16th, 2025

Functions in MortalityLaws (2.1.3)

Compute Life Tables from Mortality Data

Compute Life Tables from Parameters of a Mortality Law

Download the Canadian Human Mortality Database (CHMD)

Download The Human Mortality Database (HMD)

Download the Australian Human Mortality Database (AHMD)

What age(s) are we looking at?

Heligman-Pollard 4 Mortality Law - 9 parameters

MortalityLaws Test Data

Depending on the chosen mortality law, additional details need to be specified in order to be able to fit the models taking into account it's particularities.

Download the Japanese Mortality Database (JMD)

bring_parameters

Bring or Rename Starting Parameters in the Law Functions

Makeham-Beard Model - 1971

Carriere Mortality Law - 1992

Check Available Loss Function

Check Data Availability in HMD

Check Available Mortality Laws

Beard Model - 1971

Function to Download Data for a one Country

Carriere Mortality Law - 1992

check_input_ReadAHMD

Check input ReadAHMD

df.residual.MortalityLaw

df.residual function for MortalityLaw

deviance.MortalityLaw

deviance function for MortalityLaw

check.MortalityLaw

Function to check input data in MortalityLaw

Convert Life Table Indicators

Function that identifies the case/problem we have to solve

Find ax indicator

Inverse-Gompertz Mortality Law - informative parameterization

coale.demeny.ax

Find ax[1:2] indicators using Coale-Demeny coefficients Here we adjust the first two values of ax to account for infant mortality more accurately

Inverse-Weibull Mortality Law

Opperman Mortality Law - 1870

make_http_request

Make HTTP request

kannisto_makeham

Kannisto-Makeham Mortality Law - 1998

Perks Model - 1932

Kannisto Mortality Law - 1998

Gamma-Gompertz Model as in Vaupel et al. (1979)

Gompertz Mortality Law - 1825

print.LifeTable

Print LifeTable

plot.MortalityLaw

Plot Function for MortalityLaw

predict.MortalityLaw

Predict function for MortalityLaw

print.availableLaws

Print availableLaws

print.availableLF

Print availableLF

print.MortalityLaw

Print MortalityLaw

Rogers-Planck Model - 1983

Gompertz Mortality Law - informative parameterization

Siler Mortality Law - 1979

Print message when saving an object

Makeham Mortality Law - 1860

Quadratic Model

print.summary.MortalityLaw

Print summary.MortalityLaw

Van der Maen 2 Model - 1943

Educate mx or qx on how to behave above age 100 if it gets in trouble (with NA's, zero's and Inf)

Van der Maen Model - 1943

Thiele Mortality Law - 1871

check_input_ReadCHMD

Check input ReadHMD

strehler_mildvan

Strehler-Mildvan Model - 1960

Summary function - display head and tail in a single data.frame The original code for this function was first written for 'psych' R package here we have modified it a bit

check_input_ReadJMD

Check input ReadAHMD

check_input_ReadHMD

Check input ReadHMD

logLik.MortalityLaw

logLik function for MortalityLaw

Select an optimizing method

Function to be Optimize

Martinelle Model - 1987

Kostaki Model - 1992

Makeham Mortality Law - informative parameterization

Save Output in the working directory

Weibull Mortality Law - 1939

Scaling method for x vector

Wittstein Mortality Law - 1883

summary.MortalityLaw

Summary MortalityLaw

Extracting the last n characters from a string

HMD sample Data object generated by the ReadHMD() function.

JMD sample Data object generated by the ReadJMD() function.

AIC.MortalityLaw

AIC function for MortalityLaw

Heligman-Pollard Mortality Law - 8 parameters - 1980

AHMD sample Data object generated by the ReadAHMD() function.

CHMD sample Data object generated by the ReadCHMD() function.

Fit Mortality Laws

MortalityLaws: Parametric Mortality Models, Life Tables and HMD

Heligman-Pollard 3 Mortality Law - 9 parameters

LifeTable.check

Check LifeTable input

Heligman-Pollard 2 Mortality Law - 8 parameters