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The missing data problem pervasively exists in statistical applications. Even as simple as the count data in mortality projections, it may not be available for certain age-and-year groups due to the budget limitations or difficulties in tracing research units, resulting in the follow-up estimation and prediction inaccuracies. To circumvent this data-driven challenge, we extend the Poisson log-normal Lee-Carter model to accommodate a more flexible time structure, and develop the new sampling algorithm that improves the MCMC convergence when dealing with incomplete mortality data. Via the overdispersion term and Gibbs sampler, the extended model can be re-written as the dynamic linear model so that both Kalman and sequential Kalman filters can be incorporated into the sampling scheme. Additionally, our meticulous prior settings can avoid the re-scaling step in each MCMC iteration, and allow model selection simultaneously conducted with estimation and prediction. The proposed method is applied to the mortality data of Chinese males during the period 1995-2016 to yield mortality rate forecasts for 2017-2039. The results are comparable to those based on the imputed data set, suggesting that our approach could handle incomplete data well.

This paper extends Bayesian mortality projection models for multiple populations considering the stochastic structure and the effect of spatial autocorrelation among the observations. We explain high levels of overdispersion according to adjacent locations based on the conditional autoregressive model. In an empirical study, we compare different hierarchical projection models for the analysis of geographical diversity in mortality between the Japanese counties in multiple years, according to age. By a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computation, results have demonstrated the flexibility and predictive performance of our proposed model., Comment: The corresponding author considers there is a huge drawback at the main methodology to revise in a long time and is not willing to be the duty of corresponding author. Hence, I request the publisher to withdraw this paper. Thanks

The improvement of mortality projection is a pivotal topic in the diverse branches related to insurance, demography, and public policy. Motivated by the thread of Lee-Carter related models, we propose a Bayesian model to estimate and predict mortality rates for multi-population. This new model features in information borrowing among populations and properly reflecting variations of data. It also provides a solution to a long-time overlooked problem: model selection for dependence structures of population-specific time parameters. By introducing a Dirac spike function, simultaneous model selection and estimation for population-specific time effects can be achieved without much extra computation cost. We use the Japanese mortality data from Human Mortality Database to illustrate the desirable properties of our model.

Airflow signal encodes rich information about respiratory system. While the gold standard for measuring airflow is to use a spirometer with an occlusive seal, this is not practical for ambulatory monitoring of patients. Advances in sensor technology have made measurement of motion of the thorax and abdomen feasible with small inexpensive devices, but estimation of airflow from these time series is challenging. We propose to use the nonlinear-type time-frequency analysis tool, synchrosqueezing transform, to properly represent the thoracic and abdominal movement signals as the features, which are used to recover the airflow by the locally stationary Gaussian process. We show that, using a dataset that contains respiratory signals under normal sleep conditions, an accurate prediction can be achieved by fitting the proposed model in the feature space both in the intra- and inter-subject setups. We also apply our method to a more challenging case, where subjects under general anesthesia underwent transitions from pressure support to unassisted ventilation to further demonstrate the utility of the proposed method.