We present a new way to model age-specific demographic variables with the example of age-specific mortality in the U.S., building on the Lee-Carter approach and extending it in several dimensions. We incorporate covariates and model their dynamics jointly with the latent variables underlying...

We present a new way to model age-specific demographic variables, using the example of age-specific mortality in the United States, building on the LeeCarter approach and extending it in several dimensions. We incorporate covariates and model their dynamics jointly with the latent variables...

Unobserved components time series models decompose a time series into a trend, a season, a cycle, an irregular disturbance, and possibly other components. These models have been successfully applied to many economic time series. The standard assumption of a linear model, often appropriate after...

Several lessons learnt from a Bayesian analysis of basic macroeconomic time series models are presented for the situation where some model parameters have substantial posterior probability near the boundary of the parameter region. This feature refers to near-instability within dynamic models,...

Suppose we wish to carry out likelihood based inference but we solely have an unbiased simulation based estimator of the likelihood.  We note that unbiasedness is enough when the estimated likelihood is used inside a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.  This result has recently been introduced in...

Damped trend exponential smoothing has previously been established as an important forecasting method. Here, it is shown to have close links to simple exponential smoothing with a smoothed error tracking signal. A special case of damped trend exponential smoothing emerges from our analysis, one...