How Do Populations Aggregate?

Dennis Feehan , University of California, Berkeley

I show that when a population can be partitioned into subgroups, the death rate for the entire population can be written as the weighted harmonic mean of the death rates in each subgroup, where the weights are given by the numbers of deaths in each subgroup. In the full paper, I will provide some insight for why this phenomenon arises, and show that it generalizes to any type of occurrence-exposure rate. I use these relationships as the starting point for investigating how populations aggregate.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 165. Mathematical Demography