Clustering country-level all-cause mortality data: a review

TL;DR

This review summarizes how clustering methods are applied to country-level all-cause mortality data, highlighting common approaches, key findings like European divisions, and gaps such as limited data diversity and evaluation of clustering quality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of clustering applications in mortality studies, including methodological choices, main findings, and identifies areas needing further research.

Findings

Clustering reveals a persistent East-West European division.

Clustering improves forecast accuracy over single-country models.

Most studies focus on developed countries using common clustering methods.

Abstract

Mortality data are relevant to demography, public health, and actuarial science. Whilst clustering is increasingly used to explore patterns in such data, no study has reviewed its application to country-level all-cause mortality. This review therefore summarises recent work and addresses key questions: why clustering is used, which mortality data are analysed, which methods are most common, and what main findings emerge. To address these questions, we examine studies applying clustering to country-level all-cause mortality, focusing on mortality indices, data sources, and methodological choices, and we replicate some approaches using Human Mortality Database (HMD) data. Our analysis reveals that clustering is mainly motivated by forecasting and by studying convergence and inequality. Most studies use HMD data from developed countries and rely on k-means, hierarchical, or functional clustering. Main findings include a persistent East-West European division across applications, with clustering generally improving forecast accuracy over single-country models. Overall, this review highlights the methodological range in the literature, summarises clustering results, and identifies gaps, such as the limited evaluation of clustering quality and the underuse of data from countries outside the high-income world.