An adaptive procedure for estimating and comparing the old-age mortality in a long historical perspective: Emilia-Romagna, 1871-2001.

When the goal of a study is to assess and compare the evolution of old mortality, the researchers often face with problems of defects in data, such as loss of accuracy and numerical inconsistency of information. In the present work, an adaptive procedure for the issue of survival estimations is proposed as a combination of several methods: spline interpolation to split grouped data into age-specific quantities; use of mortality models for estimating the risk of death at advanced ages; methods for choosing the fitting age range based on the analysis of life-table aging rates. The procedure is applied to Emilia-Romagna data in order to construct complete period life tables corresponding to the occurrence of each population census from 1871 to 2001, and, finally, to compare the measures of old-age mortality by time and sex.