Forecasting Longevity for Financial Applications: A First Experiment with Deep Learning Methods

Forecasting longevity is essential in multiple research and policy areas, including the pricing of life insurance contracts, the valuation of capital market solutions for longevity risk management, and pension policy. This paper empirically investigates the predictive performance of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures in jointly modeling and multivariate time series forecasting of age-specific mortality rates at all ages. We fine-tune the three hidden layers GRU and LSTM model’s hyperparameters for time series forecasting and compare the model’s forecasting accuracy with that produced by traditional Generalised Age-Period-Cohort (GAPC) stochastic mortality models. The empirical results suggest that the two RNN architectures generally outperform the GAPC models investigated in both the male and female populations, but the results are sensitive to the accuracy criteria. The empirical results also show that the RNN-GRU network slightly outperforms the RNN with an LSTM architecture and can produce mortality schedules that capture relatively well the dynamics of mortality rates across age and time. Further investigations considering other RNN architectures, calibration procedures, and sample datasets are necessary to confirm the superiority of RNN in forecasting longevity.