Back

Local and global mortality experience: A novel hierarchical model for regional mortality risk

Nalmpatian, A.; Heumann, C.; Alkaya, L.; Jackson, W.

2024-10-18 health informatics
10.1101/2024.10.17.24315673 medRxiv
Show abstract

Accurate mortality risk assessment is critical for decision-making in life insurance, healthcare, and public policy. Regional variability in mortality, driven by diverse local factors and inconsistent data availability, presents significant modeling challenges. This study introduces a novel hierarchical mortality risk model that integrates global and local data, enhancing regional mortality estimation across diverse regions. The proposed approach employs a two-stage process: first, a global Light Gradient Boosting Machine model is trained on globally shared features; second, region-specific models are developed to incorporate local characteristics. This framework outperforms both purely local models and standard imputation techniques, particularly in data-scarce regions, by leveraging global patterns to improve generalization. The model is computationally efficient, scalable, and robust in handling missing values, making it adaptable for other domains requiring integration of multi-regional data. This method enhances predictive accuracy across various regions and provides a more reliable approach for mortality risk estimation in data-scarce environments.

Published in PLOS ONE (predicted rank #5) · training set

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.