An APC approach in transforming cohort fertility levels into schedules: evidence from European countries

P. C. Roger Cheng, National Central University, Taiwan
Eric S. Lin, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

In our previous work we developed a simple age-period-cohort framework in forecasting cohort fertility schedules, and made full use of 1917--2005 U.S. data to obtain robust outcomes. Our new approach 1) is easy to implement, 2) can estimate the entire cohort fertility schedule with relatively mild data requirement, and 3) has been shown to outperform other popular methods in the literature in forecasting sense. In sum, the procedure is divided into two steps: the first is to estimate cohort fertility levels and the second is to transform a level into a schedule. In this paper, we extend our previous work by incorporating fertility data from European countries, keep the focus on the second step, mark any period of 25 consecutive years as a sample, and carry out validation experiments to all cohorts covered in each sample period. Performances of our approach and some representative ones proposed in the literature will be evaluated and compared, according to the root mean square error (RMSE) criterion.