September 29, 2014 | News | New Publication

Multistate Analysis of Life Histories with R

The new book by MPIDR researcher Frans Willekens, Multistate analysis of Life Histories with R, is a step-by-step procedure to investigate life histories using descriptive methods and statistical modeling as well as “R”, a free software programming language for statistical computing.

Following the MPIDR’s tradition to promote and foster free access to demographic data, tools, and results, MDPR research scientist Frans Willekens has now published a book on the analysis of life histories (event histories) using multistate models and their implementation in the free statistical programming language "R". The multistate perspective conceptualizes the life course as a sequence of states and transitions between states.

The book has been published by Springer in its popular “Use R!” series. The Comprehensive R Network Archive (CRAN) includes several packages for multistate modeling. Frans Willeken´s book focuses on the Biograph package, which is designed to enhance the exploratory and statistical analysis of life histories. It incorporates utilities that connect to several other packages for multistate modeling developed in biostatistics, epidemiology, and the social sciences, including survival, eha, Epi, mvna, etm, mstate, msm, and TraMineR for sequence analysis.

Multistate modeling emerged as the standard approach to the analysis of life-history data. Multistate models are used to assess the impact of personal attributes, lifestyle factors, living conditions, and interventions (such as treatment and policies) on the life course.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research follows the policy of supporting free tools and free access to research and data. Its journal Demographic Research was one of the first free online open-access journals in science. The journal strives to publish peer-reviewed papers within one month of final acceptance. The MPIDR is also active in hosting a growing wealth of demographic databases with free access for everyone.