Bayesian Demography: Projecting the Iraqi Kurdish Population, 1977–1990

Abstract

Projecting populations that have sparse or unreliable data, such as those of many developing countries, presents a challenge to demographers. The assumptions that they make to project data-poor populations frequently fall into the realm of “educated guesses,” and the resulting projections, often regarded as forecasts, are valid only to the extent that the assumptions on which they are based reasonably represent the past or future, as the case may be. These traditional projection techniques do not incorporate a demographer's assessment of uncertainty in the assumptions. Addressing the challenges of forecasting a data-poor population, we project the Iraqi Kurdish population using a Bayesian approach. This approach incorporates a demographer's uncertainty about past and future characteristics of the population in the form of elicited prior distributions.

Key Words:

• Census data
• Cohort-component projections
• Elicitation
• Forecasting
• Population
• Population projections
• Subjective opinion
• Vital rates.