Mortality Modeling Under Stochastic Frailty

Abstract

When mortality statistics are reported for fatal diseases, they reflect the ratio of the overall mortality within the target population which is impacted from the disease in question. Reporting overall mortality leads to erroneous predictions since cohorts with different frailties are impacted at different rates. In this paper, we study methods for predicting mortality under varying conditions with the goal of removing the impact of hidden heterogeneity from the parameter estimates.