Surface Plots of Rates of Mortality Improvement

Abstract

Surface maps of unsmoothed and smoothed mortality data have been used widely before. In this chapter, we present surface plots of rates of mortality improvement (“ROMI”), which are the derivative of age-specific mortality with respect to time. They have been introduced rather recently. By showing a large set of surface maps for countries from the Human Mortality Database, we argue that those ROMI plots are better able to detect period and cohort effects than standard mortality surface maps.