MPIDR Technical Report

Analyzing the young adult mortality hump in R with MortHump

Abstract

MortHump is an R package designed to provide ready-to-use methods to analyse the young adult mortality hump. It contains functions to

• format all-cause and cause-of-death data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and the Human Cause-of-Death Database (HCD) respectively,
• identify and group causes of death that are likely to contribute to the young adult mortality hump,
• estimate parametric and non-parametric models that isolate the young adult mortality hump from the rest of the force of mortality, decomposing when needed by cause of death,
• measure the young adult mortality hump by computing summary statistics about its magnitude, location and spread, optionally by cause of death.

This technical paper is meant as a user guide for the MortHump package and provides examples on how to use its functions.