A Mortality Model with Delayed Deaths and Cure

Trifon I. Missov, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Maxim Finkelstein, University of the Free State

We model individual lifetimes by partially adopting the Strehler-Mildvan framework of shocks (Strehler and Mildvan, 1960), which lead to death when they exceed one's vitality at the moment of occurrence. The conceptual difference that we offer is that i) shocks are treated as events that initiate deterioration processes which affect one's vitality with a delay; ii) a organism can fully recover with a certain probability after a shock occurs. Our goals are: i) to construct an adequate probabilistic model with delayed deaths and cure (DDC) and study the shape of the population's hazard for different delay distributions (with and without cure), ii) to characterize the class of DDC models which correspond to the frailty model by Vaupel et al., 1979, and iii) to simulate cohorts according to DDC and analyze the mortality patterns for the aggregated data by periods.