CS&SS/STAT/SOC 563 - Statistical Demography

Note: This syllabus will be updated throughout the quarter, and the current version will be on the web, so check back from time to time.

Instructor: Adrian Raftery, Departments of Statistics and Sociology. My office is room C-313, Padelford Hall. My phone number is 206-543-4505, which I will answer during office hours. My email address is raftery AT uw DOT edu; email is the best way to contact me outside office hours. The course Web page is www.stat.washington.edu/raftery/C563, and a large part of the material will also be on the course Canvas page.

Office hours: I will hold office hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, 4:30-5:30pm in Padelford C-313, or by appointment. Please do not hesitate to come and see me if you have a problem or if you just want to discuss issues arising in the class.

I will also hold "electronic office hours" by responding to email questions, with a target response time of one working day. If it seems appropriate to me, and if you don't ask me not to, I will send the response to the class mailing list after removing your name and identifying information, and it will be posted automatically on the class archive accessible from the course home page.

Teaching assistant: Daphne Liu, Department of Statistics. Email: dhliu@uw.edu. Daphne will lead the homework review sessions on Wednesdays, 3:30-4:20. She will hold office hours on Mondays 11:00-noon and Fridays 2:00-3:00pm.

Note: There will be no class on Wednesday April 10.

Prerequisites: One of the following:

• STAT 512
• CS&SS/STAT/ECON 509
• CS&SS 560
• CS&SS 564, or
• permission of instructor,

Registration: Please register for the course for credit; auditing is not allowed. If you are not a registered student but are a UW employee, you may be eligible to take this class tuition-free via the UW Tuition Exemption Benefit. In any event, all students must register. See the . registration instructions for students, UW employees and non-UW individuals.

Requirements: Your course grade will be based on homework assignments (50%), a term paper (40%), including two presentations, and class participation (10%).

Homework will be assigned most weeks, and will be due on the course Canvas web page on the Monday of the following week at 2:30pm. This schedule is designed so that homework can be corrected and returned to you quickly, usually at the Wednesday homework review session, where it will be discussed. To enable us to do this, we won't be able to accept late homework.

Computing: Most of the homework assignments will involve computing. The preferred software for the class is R, which can be downloaded for free at CRAN where good tutorial and introductory documentation is also available.

Course description: Statistical demography deals with methods for estimating and projecting population, fertility, mortality and migration. The course will cover:

• Review of basic demographic methods
• Modeling age-specific rates, including model schedules and Lee-Carter method
• Statistical modeling and projection of fertility, mortality, migration and population
• Reconstructing population and vital rates from imperfect data.
• Demography and Big Data.

Textbooks:There is no textbook for the course, but the first part of the course will draw on the following:
Wachter, Kenneth W. (2014). Essential Demographic Methods. Harvard University Press. (Available electronically from the UW Library.)
Preston, Samuel H., Heuveline, Patrick and Guillot, Michel (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell Publishers.
Keyfitz, Nathan and Caswell, Hal (2005). Applied Mathematical Demography. Springer. (Available electronically from the UW Library.)

The latter parts of the course will draw largely on recent research articles, some of which are available here.

Course outline:

1. Demographic rates: Life tables, mortality rates, fertility rates, migration rates.
   Readings: One of:
   Wachter, chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 7.1, 7.2.
   Keyfitz & Caswell (2005), chapter 2.
   Preston, Heuveline & Guillot (2001), chapters 1, 2, 3, 5.

2. Population projection and Leslie matrix:
   Readings: One of:
   Wachter, chapter 5.
   Keyfitz & Caswell (2005), chapter 3.
   Preston, Heuveline & Guillot (2001), chapter 6.

3. Modeling age-specific mortality and fertility rates: Gompertz-Makeham model, model schedules and the Brass method, Lee-Carter method, Hyndman-Ullah method.
   Readings:
   Wachter ch. 3.5, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7
   Lee & Carter (1992)
   Hyndman & Ullah (2007)
   Supplementary readings:
   Li, Lee & Gerland (2013), Sharrow, Clark & Raftery (2014).

4. Review of Bayesian hierarchical models and Markov chain Monte Carlo.
   Reading: Gelman and Hill (2007), chapter 16.
   

5. Probabilistic projection of total fertility.
   Readings: Alkema et al (2011), Raftery, Alkema and Gerland (2014).
   Supplementary reading: Fosdick and Raftery (2014).

6. Probabilistic projection of mortality.
   Readings:
   Raftery, Chunn et al (2014).
   Raftery, Lalic et al (2014).
   Sevcikova et al (2016).

7. Probabilistic projection of migration.
   Readings:
   Azose & Raftery (2015).
   Cohen (2008).
   Cohen & Kim (2010).

8. Probabilistic population projections.
   Readings:
   Raftery et al (2012)
   Azose, Sevcikova & Raftery (2016).
   Supplementary readings:
   Stoto (1983).
   Lee & Tuljapurkar (1994).
   Lutz et al (2001)
   O'Neill (2004).

9. Estimating mortality, fertility, migration and population:
   Readings:
   Alkema et al (2012)
   You et al (2015).
   Wheldon et al (2013).
   Abel (2010, JRSS A).
   Raymer et al (2013).
   Supplementary readings:
   Abel (2013, DR).
   Abel & Sander (2014, Science).
   Bryant & Graham (2013, BA).
   Wheldon et al (2015).
   Wheldon et al (2016).

10. Demography, Big Data and agent-based modeling
    Readings:
    Zagheni and Weber (2012, 2015).
    Sevcikova et al (2007).

Last updated January 30, 2020