Handbook for the use of death distribution methods

Abstract

This technical note is intended to examine the DDMs available for estimating the completeness of adult mortality information and to discuss their main limitations and advantages in national and subnational applications in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents an example of the use of the methods, based on the evaluation of data quality, using different packages developed in the R programming language: the DDM package (Riffe, Lima and Queiroz, 2017) and the DemoTools package (Riffe and others, 2019). Finally, it discusses the methods’ advantages and limitations and the importance of assessing the quality of the input data prior to use. The example files and R scripts used to apply the methods are annexed to this note.