Sex-specific mortality forecasting for UK countries: a coherent approach

This paper introduces a gender specific model for the joint mortality projection of three countries (England and Wales combined, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) of the United Kingdom. The model, called 2-tier Augmented Common Factor model, extends the classical Lee and Carter [26] and Li and Lee [32] models, with a common time factor for the whole UK population, a sex specific period factor for males and females, and a specific time factor for each country within each gender. As death counts in each subpopulation are modelled directly, a Poisson framework is used. Our results show that the 2-tier ACF model improves the in-sample fitting compared to the use of independent LC models for each subpopulation or of independent Li and Lee models for each couple of genders within each country. Mortality projections also show that the 2-tier ACF model produces coherent forecasts for the two genders within each country and different countries within each gender, thus avoiding the divergence issues arising when independent projections are used. The 2-tier ACF is further extended to include a cohort term to take into account the faster improvements of the UK ‘golden generation’

Interpretable and Reliable Rule Classification Based on Conformal Prediction

This paper deals with the challenging problem of simultaneously integrating interpretablility and reliability into prediction models in machine learning. It proposes to combine the interpretable models of decision rules with the reliable models based on conformal prediction. The result is a new technique of conformal decision rules. Given a test instance, the technique is capable of providing a point prediction, an explanation, and a confidence value for that prediction plus a prediction set. The experiments show when and how conformal decision rules can be used for interpretable and reliable machine learning