Mortality Rate by Age

Working further with the mortality data from, I’ve added a breakdown of deaths by age and gender to the lifespan package on GitHub.

Here’s a summary plot:

> library(lifespan)
> NYEARS = length(unique(deaths$year))
> ggplot(deathsage, aes(x = age, y = count / NYEARS / 1000)) +
+   geom_area(aes(fill = sex), position = &quot;identity&quot;, alpha = 0.5) +
+   geom_line(aes(group = sex)) +
+   # facet_wrap(~ sex, ncol = 1) +
+   labs(x = &quot;Age&quot;, y = &quot;Deaths per Year [thousands]&quot;) +
+   scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 150, 10), limits = c(0, 120)) +
+   theme_minimal() + theme(legend.title = element_blank())

There are a few interesting observations to be made. We’ll start with the most obvious:

  • on average, females live longer than males;
  • modal age at death is 81 for males and 86 for females;
  • there are more infant deaths among males than females (probably linked to greater number of male births); and
  • there is a rapid escalation in deaths among teenage males (consistent with fact that teenage males are more likely to commit suicide, be involved in fatal vehicle accidents, or be victims of homicide). </ul> Another way of looking at the same data is with a stacked area plot. It’s more difficult to see compare genders, but gives a better indication of the overall mortality rate.

Categorically Variable