LIFE EXPECTANCY

When someone walks into an insurance company and wants to purchase life insurance, the insurance company has to consider an important question: How long will this client live? His date of death is not exactly predictable, so the insurer does not know exactly when the life insurance benefits will be payable. However, the insurer can use a model that can calculate human mortality. With this mortality model, probabilities of deaths at particular ages can be calculated. Rather than trying to figure out when a client dies, the convention in actuarial science is to phrase things in terms of survival models. There are popular survival functions that enable insurers to perform this calculation. With these functions, insurers are able to efficiently provide this service and ensure that life insurance will continue to be a thriving field of work. After we define basic notation and terms, we look at standard survival models. Then we consider a recently proposed model by Chi Heem Wong and Albert K. Tsui