Comparison of accuracy between LC model and 4-PFM when COVID-19 impacts mortality structure

Abstract

This paper studies if the accuracies of mortality models (LC model vs. 4-parametric model) are aggravated if a mortality structure changes due to the impact of COVID-19. LC model (LCM) uses dimension reduction for fitting to the log mortality matrix so that the performance of the dimension reduction method may not be good when the matrix structure changes. On the other hand, 4-parametric factor model (4-PFM) is designed to use factors for fitting to log mortality data by age groups so that it would be less affected by the change of the mortality structure. In fact, the forecast accuracies of LCM are better than those of 4-PFM when life-tables are used whereas those of 4-PFM are better when the mortality structure changes. Thus this result shows that 4-PFM is more reliable in performance to the structural changes of the mortality. To support the accuracy changes of LCM the functional aspect is explained by computing eigenvalues produced by singular vector decomposition