Mortality information is very important for national planning and health of a country. Mortality rate forecasting is a basic contribution for the projection of financial improvement of pension plans, well-being and social strategy planning. In the first part of the thesis, we fit the selected mortality rate models, namely the Power-exponential function based model, the ModifiedPerks model and the Heligman and Pollard (HP4) model to the data obtained from the HumanMortality Database [22] for the male population ages 1–70 of the USA, Japan and Australia. We observe that the Heligman and Pollard (HP4) model performs well and better fit the data as compared to the Power-exponential function based model and the Modified Perks model. The second part is to systematically compare the quality of the mortality rate forecasting using the second order Lee–Carter method with the selected mortality rate models. The results indicate that Power-exponential function based model and the Heligman and Pollard (HP4) model gives a more reliable forecast depending on individual countries.

The work done in this thesis is to examine various methods for curve fitting. Linear least squares and non-linear least squares will be described and compared, and the Newton method, Gauss--Newton method and Levenberg--Marquardt method will be applied to example problems. / Syftet med denna uppsats är att beskriva och använda olika metoder för kurvanpassning, det vill säga att passa matematiska funktioner till data. De metoder som undersöks är Newtons metod, Gauss--Newton metoden och Levenberg--Marquardt metoden. Även skillnaden mellan linjär minsta kvadrat anpassning och olinjär minsta kvadrat anpassning. Till sist tillämpas Newton, Gauss Newton och Levenberg--Marquardt metoderna på olika exempel.