Evaluation of small-area estimation methods for mortality schedules

Mortality patterns at a subnational level or across subpopulations are often used to examine the health of a population or for designing health policies. In large populations, the estimation of mortality indicators is rather straightforward. In small populations, however, death counts are driven by stochastic variation. In order to deal with this problem, demographers have proposed a variety of methods which all make use of knowledge about the shape of human mortality schedules. In practice, it is not readily clear how the methods relate to each other hindering informed decisions when choosing a method. We aim to provide guidance. First, we review recent demographic methods for the estimation of mortality schedules in small populations - emphasizing data requirements and ease of use. Second, by means of a simulation study, we evaluate the performance of three main classes of methods with respect to exposure size as well as sensitivity to the incorporated demographic knowledge. Often neglected by previous studies, we show that there is considerable variability in the performance across ages and regions and that this performance can depend on the choice of incorporated demographic knowledge.