Stochastic Population Forecasting: A Bayesian Approach Based on Evaluation by Experts

Abstract

We suggest a procedure for deriving expert based stochastic population forecasts within the Bayesian approach. According to the traditional and commonly used cohort-component model, the inputs of the forecasting procedures are the fertility and mortality age schedules along with the distribution of migrants by age. Age schedules and distributions are derived from summary indicators, such as total fertility rates, male and female life expectancy at birth, and male and female number of immigrants and emigrants. The joint distributions of all summary indicators are obtained based on evaluations by experts, elicited according to a conditional procedure that makes it possible to derive information on the centres of the indicators, their variability, their across-time correlations, and the correlations between the indicators. The forecasting method is based on a mixture model within the Supra-Bayesian approach that treats the evaluations by experts as data and the summary indicators as parameters. The derived posterior distributions are used as forecast distributions of the summary indicators of interest. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm is designed to approximate such posterior distributions.