Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2016
Several methods of forecasting mortality have from time to time been suggested. Some of them have, however, only been applied to the statistics of one or two countries and, while they have been found to be satisfactory in these cases, we cannot justifiably say that the assumptions on which they are based are universally valid. In §§ 3–7 these standard methods of mortality forecasting will, with necessary modifications, be applied to Australian data. These sections do not, therefore, involve anything in the way of new principle, but, being applications of old methods to new data, they should make a further contribution to our knowledge of the validity of the assumptions on which these standard methods are based. In § 9 a further method of forecasting will be described, and in § 10 the results obtained by the several methods will be compared.