New Australian data on the HMD

тотальный репост отсюда, ничего не менял, прагматика в конце

The Human Mor­tal­ity Data­base is a won­der­ful resource for any­one inter­ested in demo­graphic data. It is a care­fully curated col­lec­tion of high qual­ity deaths and pop­u­la­tion data from 37 coun­tries, all in a con­sis­tent for­mat with con­sis­tent def­i­n­i­tions. I have used it many times and never cease to be amazed at the care taken to main­tain such a great resource.

The data are con­tin­u­ally being revised and updated. Today the Aus­tralian data has been updated to 2011. There is a time lag because of lagged death reg­is­tra­tions which results in under­counts; so only data that are likely to be com­plete are included.

Tim Riffe from the HMD has pro­vided the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion about the update:

1. All death counts since 1964 are now included by year of occur­rence, up to 2011. We have 2012 data but do not pub­lish them because they are likely a 5% under­count due to lagged registration.
2. Death count inputs for 1921 to 1963 are now in sin­gle ages. Pre­vi­ously they were in 5-​​year age groups. Rather than hav­ing an open age group of 85+ in this period counts usu­ally go up to the max­i­mum observed (stated) age. This change (i) intro­duces minor heap­ing in early years and (ii) implies dif­fer­ent appar­ent old-​​age mor­tal­ity than before, since pre­vi­ously any­thing above 85 was mod­eled accord­ing to the Meth­ods Pro­to­col.
3. Pop­u­la­tion denom­i­na­tors have been swapped out for years 1992 to the present, owing to new ABS method­ol­ogy and inter­censal esti­mates for the recent period.

Some of the data can be read into R using the hmd.mx and hmd.e0 func­tions from the demog­raphy pack­age. Tim has his own pack­age on github that pro­vides a more exten­sive inter­face.