Hello Varaluxmee Permall, I recall in lectures 10 years ago, they termed the Segi population one that was used for age standardisation. I've not used it at all or ever referred to it, so don't have any idea, just recall the terminology so maybe something to check out. Cheers, Deborah Hilton Statistics Online

http://sites.google.com/site/deborahhilton/

Varaluxmee, number of samples within the open age group would be very small. Even if you were to consider the entire population of the world, people living beyond 85+ would be in few thousands. Again this group of octogenarians would be living in remote areas, tribal areas, mountainous regions.

In India we have Databases likes National Population Register, National Sample Survey Organization, from which you can extract relevant information.

In countries where such databases are not available, I suggest you scan the local press (newspapers, magazines etc) and the internet search engines. Thus you can identify geographical areas where 85+ people are living. Authentication of their age is a problem, as they might not have the birth certificates or school certificates.

You might be aware of the fact that the data thus generated has to be analyzed using Extreme Value Theory/ Distributions.

Hi Deborah, thank you very much for the suggestion. I shall do some research about this technique and see if it can be applied to my database.

Hello Sridhar Sambatur, thanks for the explanation. Sorry, I didn't specify that my work concerns only Mauritius, with a population of 1.3m. Then, I think the corresponding age specific populations will be smaller. I was also considering constrained or weighted penalized splines smoothing to take care of heterogeneity of variance.

Dear Varaluxmee,

You can fit a Makeham function through the last six nqx / (1 - nqx) values available (see United Nations. 1982. Model Life Tables for Developing Countries (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.81.XIII.7).

You can find this procedure in the LIFTB application of United Nations software MORTPAK for Windows.

Hello Thomas,

Thanks for this interesting suggestion. I shall try it right now.

Thanks again.