LCFIT: The Lee-Carter Fitter
Important Links:
REGISTER here,
LOGIN here,
SINGLE-POP TUTORIAL here,
COHERENT-POP TUTORIAL here.
This is the home page of LCFIT, a web-based computer program that allows users to create mortality models and forecasts based on the "Lee-Carter model" using an intuitive form-based approach. This model of historic mortality change, along with associated forecasting techniques, was introduced by Ronald D. Lee and Lawrence Carter in 1992 with the article "Modeling and Forecasting the Time Series of U.S. Mortality," (Journal of the American Statistical Association 87 (September): 659-671). See the papers on Prof. Lee's website for extensions and applications. There is also an article on Wikipedia.
Please register to use LCFIT by clicking the link above. Once you receive a username and password, follow the links below for the tutorial and more documentation. Then start experimenting with your own mortality rates of interest. There are also links to mortality rates datasets that are ready to enter into LCFIT at the bottom of this page.
Please cite LCFIT as "Sprague, W. Webb (2009) LCFIT (web based software for estimating the Lee-Carter method for modeling and forecasting mortality, with extensions to Coherent Forecasts of Li and Lee, and Lee-Carter method with sparse and incomplete data)"
Note, if you have a problem, ASK FOR HELP! Designing a user interface for forecasting mortality is not easy, and some choices have been made that might not be intuitive to a user, even after reading the documentation. If something doesn't behave as expected, PLEASE send an email to us and we will try to help with your project.
Warning: This software is under constant development and is without warranty; use the results at your own risk. Please send errors to the address email above, with as much contextual information as possible. Finally, please note that sometimes you may experience unexpected errors while processing data, due to the fact that this software is being developed "live"; if you do get unexpected output, try again in a few minutes. If trouble continues, email us.
This work was done under the auspices of CEDA, under the supervision of Prof. Ronald Lee.
Tutorial here.
Brief Instructions here.
Longer Instructions here.
PAA 2007 submission on LCFIT (formerly "LAR-E") here.
PAA 2007 poster on LCFIT here.
Email the administrator at lcfit@demog.berkeley.edu.
Useful demography tools for manipulating life tables, among many other applications, can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Development of the extensions of the Lee-Carter method and development of this web-based software was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Aging R03-AG024314.
test
Some sample data
Sweden Simple (1950-2002, ages 0 ... 110+, ready to enter to LC).
Assembled low mortality country age-specific POPULATION.
Assembled low mortality country age-specifice MORTALITY RATES.
Sweden f, m, c (1950-2002, ages 0 ... 110+, ready to enter to LC Two-Sex).
Sweden Mortality and Population (1950-2002, ages 0 ... 110+, ready to enter to LC Coherent).
All country data from Nan Li: "px"for population counts, "mx" for mortality rates.
2-sex population and mortality for Sweden
Links
Author of alternative LC library in R
Code and backups
A git repository for LCFIT has been started here .