Bayesian reconstruction of historical population in Finland 1647-1850

The scarcity of long-run historical population series is a major problem because these are vital inputs for many fields of history, demography, and economics. Perhaps the most crucial omission thus far in historical population reconstructions has been the unavailability of uncertainty estimates, leaving the door open for conflicting interpretations of respective population developments. In this talk, I will describe a Bayesian hierarchical time series model that allows us to integrate partially observed parish level data and prior information in a coherent manner, providing us with model-based posterior intervals for the population estimates. We demonstrate its applicability by estimating long-term Finnish population development from 1647 onwards. This puts Finland among the very few countries with an annual population series of this length available.<br>(Slides start with a short bio)

October 2, 2019

12:00 AM

Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Joint Statistics and DEMO seminar