Visualizing Europe's demographic scars with coplots and contour plots.

ABSTRACT: We present two enhancements to existing methods for visualizing vital statistics data. Data from the Human Mortality Database were used and vital statistics from England and Wales are used for illustration. The simpler of these methods involves coplotting mean age of death with its variance, and the more complex of these methods is to present data as a contour plot. The coplot method shows the effect of the 20th century's epidemiological transitions. The contour plot method allows more complex and subtle age, period and cohort effects to be seen. The contour plot shows the effects of broad improvements in public health over the 20th century, including vast reductions in rates of childhood mortality, reduced baseline mortality risks during adulthood and the postponement of higher mortality

SUBMITTER: Minton J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3781004 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature