Statistical Demography and Data Science (CS&SS/STAT/SOC 563)
Posted: 2/18/2020 (Local Events)
Demography aims to estimate and forecast population, fertility, mortality and migration. This is important for government policy-making, private sector planning, and research in the health and social sciences, and also critical for climate science and global health. It has traditionally been done using deterministic methods, but these ignore uncertainty and measurement error. In the past decade, modern statistical methods were developed for this at the UW Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, and these were recently adopted by the UN for their official population forecasts for all countries. Another recent breakthrough is the use of social media data and other big data, particularly to estimate migration. Statistical demography and data science is expanding rapidly, and this course will teach theory and practice of methods and models of the field.
Topics:
Review of basic demographic methods
Modeling age-specic 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.
Prerequisites: A good grounding in basic probability and statistics, some exposure to
mathematical statistics, and basic mathematics including basic calculus and matrix algebra.