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Point and interval forecasts of age-specific fertility rates: a comparison of functional principal component methods

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Abstract

Accurate forecasts of age-specific fertility rates are critical for government policy, planning and decision making. With the availability of the Human Fertility Database (2011), the paper compares the empirical accuracy of the point and interval forecasts, obtained by the approach of Hyndman and Ullah (Comput Stat Data Anal 51(10), 4942–4956, 2007) and its variants for forecasting age-specific fertility rates. The analyses are carried out using the age-specific fertility data of 15 mostly developed countries. Based on the one-step-ahead to 20-step-ahead forecast error measures, the weighted Hyndman-Ullah method provides the most accurate point and interval forecasts for forecasting age-specific fertility rates, among all the methods we investigated.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editor-in-chief, the associate editor, and two referees for their insightful comments, which led to a much improved version of the manuscript. The author thanks Professors Heather Booth and Rob Hyndman for introducing him to the field of demographic forecasting.

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  1. Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Monash University, Melbourne, Vic 3145, Australia

    Han Lin Shang

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Correspondence to Han Lin Shang.

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Shang, H.L. Point and interval forecasts of age-specific fertility rates: a comparison of functional principal component methods. J Pop Research 29, 249–267 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-012-9087-4

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