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MortalityLaws: Parametric Mortality Models, Life Tables and HMD

Fit the most popular human mortality laws, and construct full and abridged life tables given various input indices. A mortality law is a parametric function that describes the dying-out process of individuals in a population during a significant portion of their life spans. For a comprehensive review of the most important mortality laws see Tabeau (2001). Function for downloading demographic data from the following sources are provided:

Installation

Make sure you have the most recent version of R
Run the following code in your R console

install.packages("MortalityLaws")

Updating to the latest version of the package

You can track and contribute to the development of MortalityLaws on GitHub. To install it:

Install the release version of devtools from CRAN with install.packages("devtools").
Make sure you have a working development environment.
- Windows: Install Rtools.
- Mac: Install Xcode from the Mac App Store.
- Linux: Install a compiler and various development libraries (details vary across different flavors of Linux).

Install the development version of MortalityLaws.

devtools::install_github("mpascariu/MortalityLaws")

Help

All functions are documented in the standard way, which means that once you load the package using library(MortalityLaws) you can just type ?MortalityLaw to see the help file.

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Version

Install

install.packages('MortalityLaws')

Monthly Downloads

622

Version

2.2.0

License

MIT + file LICENSE

Issues

Pull Requests

Stars

Forks

Repository

https://github.com/mpascariu/MortalityLaws

Maintainer

Marius Pascariu

Last Published

May 5th, 2026

Functions in MortalityLaws (2.2.0)

Fit Mortality Laws

Compute Life Tables from Mortality Data

Check Data Availability in HMD

check_input_ReadAHMD

Check input ReadAHMD

Heligman-Pollard 4 Mortality Law - 9 parameters

What age(s) are we looking at?

Heligman-Pollard 3 Mortality Law - 9 parameters

check.MortalityLaw

Function to check input data in MortalityLaw

Download The Human Mortality Database (HMD)

check_input_ReadCHMD

Check input for ReadCHMD

Run the optimisation routine

check_input_ReadHMD

Check input ReadHMD

check_input_ReadJMD

Check input ReadJMD

Function to Download Data for a one Country

MortalityLaws Test Data

df.residual.MortalityLaw

df.residual function for MortalityLaw

deviance.MortalityLaw

deviance function for MortalityLaw

MortalityLaws: Parametric Mortality Models, Life Tables and HMD

Download the Australian Human Mortality Database (AHMD)

coale.demeny.ax

Find ax[1:2] indicators using Coale-Demeny coefficients Here we adjust the first two values of ax to account for infant mortality more accurately

Check Available Mortality Laws

Check Available Loss Functions

Download the Canadian Human Mortality Database (CHMD)

Makeham Mortality Law - 1860

Carriere Mortality Law - 1992

Gamma-Gompertz Model as in Vaupel et al. (1979)

make_http_request

Make HTTP request

Gompertz Mortality Law - 1825

Carriere Mortality Law - 1992

Find ax indicator

Function that identifies the case/problem we have to solve

Kannisto Mortality Law - 1998

summary.MortalityLaw

Summary MortalityLaw

plot.MortalityLaw

Plot Method for MortalityLaw

predict.MortalityLaw

Predict function for MortalityLaw

print.MortalityLaw

Print MortalityLaw

kannisto_makeham

Kannisto-Makeham Mortality Law - 1998

Download the Japanese Mortality Database (JMD)

Extracting the last n characters from a string

print.LifeTable

Print LifeTable

Convert Life Table Indicators

print.summary.MortalityLaw

Print summary.MortalityLaw

Beard Model - 1971

Martinelle Model - 1987

Retrieve model-specific details for fitting

Kostaki Model - 1992

Gompertz Mortality Law - informative parameterization

Makeham Mortality Law - informative parameterization

Summary function - display head and tail in a single data.frame The original code for this function was first written for 'psych' R package here we have modified it a bit

Makeham-Beard Model - 1971

logLik.MortalityLaw

logLik function for MortalityLaw

bring_parameters

Bring or Rename Starting Parameters in the Law Functions

Quadratic Model

Objective function to minimise during optimisation

Inverse-Gompertz Mortality Law - informative parameterization

Inverse-Weibull Mortality Law

Rogers-Planck Model - 1983

Wittstein Mortality Law - 1883

print.availableLaws

Print availableLaws

Print message when saving an object

Thiele Mortality Law - 1871

Weibull Mortality Law - 1939

print.availableLF

Print availableLF

Educate mx or qx on how to behave above age 100 if it gets in trouble (with NA's, zero's and Inf)

strehler_mildvan

Strehler-Mildvan Model - 1960

Opperman Mortality Law - 1870

Van der Maen Model - 1943

Siler Mortality Law - 1979

Perks Model - 1932

Van der Maen 2 Model - 1943

Save Output in the working directory

Scale the age vector for stable optimisation

Heligman-Pollard 2 Mortality Law - 8 parameters

Heligman-Pollard Mortality Law - 8 parameters - 1980

JMD sample Data object generated by the ReadJMD() function.

AIC.MortalityLaw

AIC function for MortalityLaw

AHMD sample Data object generated by the ReadAHMD() function.

Compute Life Tables from Parameters of a Mortality Law

HMD sample Data object generated by the ReadHMD() function.

LifeTable.check

Check LifeTable input

CHMD sample Data object generated by the ReadCHMD() function.