Hi,

In "Skew-t fits to mortality data - can a Gaussian-related distribution replace the Gompertz-Makeham as the basis for mortality studies?" (J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 2013 August ;68(8):903-913; doi:10.1093/Gerona/gls239) Clark et al compares the fit of several distributions to mortality data (using the bbmle package, among others).

This is not the place to comment on the paper, of course. Just wanted to share with you the following quote (p. 906) -almost a throwaway remark given the context of the paper- which may be of interest to the statisticians in the forum:

"[T]here was a lack of catalogue number referencing for statistical objects. Attempts at cataloguing are under way (eg the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions), but the present lack of number referencing could be contrasted with, for example, that for genes, genomes, single-nucleotide polymorphisms or proteins. This has, seemingly, led in some cases to poor characterisation: for example... the AIC is calculated differently in packages bbmle and gamlss". And then they provide one suggestion for cataloguing.

An obvious question to the forum is how come the AIC is calculated differently depending on the package, but I wanted to highlight this need for cataloguing statistical objects akin to genes, proteins, etc.

Kind regards,

José

Prof. José Iparraguirre
Chief Economist
Age UK

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