Related papers: Is there a cap on longevity? A statistical review
The probability of detecting technosignatures (i.e. evidence of technological activity beyond Earth) increases with their longevity, or the time interval over which they manifest. Therefore, the assumed distribution of longevities has some…
This paper assesses the hedge effectiveness of an index-based longevity swap and a longevity cap. Although swaps are a natural instrument for hedging longevity risk, derivatives with non-linear pay-offs, such as longevity caps, also provide…
We introduce the following model for the evolution of a population. At every discrete time $j\geq 0$ exactly one individual is introduced in the population and is assigned a death probability $c_j$ sampled from $C$, a fixed probability…
An essential input of annuity pricing is the future retiree mortality. From observed age-specific mortality data, modeling and forecasting can be taken place in two routes. On the one hand, we can first truncate the available data to…
A novel, non-trivial, probabilistic upper bound on the entropy of an unknown one-dimensional distribution, given the support of the distribution and a sample from that distribution, is presented. No knowledge beyond the support of the…
A multilevel functional data method is adapted for forecasting age-specific mortality for two or more populations in developed countries with high-quality vital registration systems. It uses multilevel functional principal component…
We study the statistics of citations from all Physical Review journals for the 110-year period 1893 until 2003. In addition to characterizing the citation distribution and identifying publications with the highest citation impact, we…
The optimal age that a retiree claims social security retirement benefits is in general a complicated function of many factors. However, if the beneficiary's finances and health are not the constraining factors, it is possible to formally…
Analyzing 13,455 journals listed in the Journal Citation Report (Thomson Reuters) from 1997 through 2013, we report that the mean cited half-life of the scholarly literature is 6.5 years and growing at a rate of 0.13 years per annum.…
The principle of linearized stability and instability is established for a classical model describing the spatial movement of an age-structured population with nonlinear vital rates. It is shown that the real parts of the eigenvalues of the…
Research has shown that most resources shared in articles (e.g., URLs to code or data) are not kept up to date and mostly disappear from the web after some years (Zeng et al., 2019). Little is known about the factors that differentiate and…
We calculate finite sample and asymptotic distributions for the largest censored and uncensored survival times, and some related statistics, from a sample of survival data generated according to an iid censoring model. These statistics are…
The Gompertz law of mortality quantitatively describes the mortality rate of humans and almost all multicellular animals. However, its underlying kinetic mechanism is unclear. The Gompertz law cannot explain the effect of temperature on…
The recent Covid-19 epidemic has lead to comparisons of the countries suffering from it. These are based on the number of excess deaths attributed either directly or indirectly to the epidemic. Unfortunately the data on which such…
Humanity's path to avoiding extinction is a daunting and inevitable challenge which proves difficult to solve, partially due to the lack of data and evidence surrounding the concept. We aim to address this confusion by addressing the most…
In temperate climates, mortality is seasonal with a winter-dominant pattern, due in part to pneumonia and influenza. Cardiac causes, which are the leading cause of death in the United States, are also winter-seasonal although it is not…
Increasing every year the retirement age by the same amount as the increase of the life expectancy gives roughly stable ratios of the number of retired to working-age people in industrialized countries. Continuous influx of immigrants,…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…
The affirmative statement of the existence of extraterrestrial life is tentatively raised to the status of a principle. Accordingly, Fermi's question is answered and the anthropic principle is shown to be falsifiable. The time-scale for the…