supercentenarian

Code accompanying the paper "Human mortality at extreme age"

The supplementary material is split in three folders:

• The folder scripts contains the main script, Semi_supercentenarian.R, in which a description of the other source files can be found. The file Semi_supercentenarian_fn.R contains auxiliary functions (likelihoods, optimisation routine, etc.) called by the user. The R code assumes the presence of three databases, italcent.rda, IDL.rda and francent.rda in the repository.

• The data folder contains descriptions of the database and scripts for preprocessing the raw data and recreating the .rda data files given the original database.

  • The Istat data can be bought for a small fee from the National Institute of Statistics by registering at the Contact Center (https://contact.istat.it) and mentioning the semi-supercentenarian Survey and Marco Marsili as contact person. A description of the spreadsheet, entitled ISTAT_Italian_SSC_1896-1910.xlsx, is provided in ISTAT_description.md.
  • The other two datasets can be obtained freely by registering on http://www.supercentenarians.org/; the supplementary material provides detailed instruction for obtaining the idl_complete.csv file. This spreadsheet can be converted into IDL.rda and francent.rda using the script data/IDL2021_preprocess.R.

• The folder auxiliary contains metadata to enhance reproducibility. The data are updated on an ongoing basis and may fail to match the version used in the paper. To palliate this problem, and assuming no records are deleted in the future, we provide two files with the dummy identifiers of IDL individuals whose records were analysed in the paper: IDL2021_id.txt and France_id.txt give the identifiers of respectively supercentenarian (excluding French and Japanese records) and French records (both semi and supercentenarians) used. The IDL2021_truncation_bounds.txt provides the calendar dates for the data collection (these were extracted from the IDL country-specific metadata). Please email Leo Belzile if you need further help with extraction or formatting of the database from the IDL.

The code and supplementary materials are made available under the CC-BY-4.0 License. The list of R packages (with version numbers) used at the time of writing is given in the renv.lock file.