Demography aims to estimate and forecast population, fertility, mortality and migration. This is important for government policy-making, private sector planning, and research in the health and social sciences, and also critical for climate science and global health. It has traditionally been done using deterministic mathematical methods, but these ignore uncertainty and measurement error.  In the past decade, modern statistical methods were developed for this by our group at the University of Washington, and these were recently adopted by the  United Nations for their official population forecasts for all countries.  Statistical demography is expanding rapidly,  and this course will teach theory and practice of  methods and models of the field, with a focus on current and potential future research. 

The topics will be: 

1. Review of basic mathematical demographic methods.

2. Modeling age-specific rates, including model schedules and Lee-Carter method.

3. Statistical modeling and projection of fertility, mortality, migration and population.

4. Reconstructing population and vital rates from imperfect data.