To analyse functional status transitions in the older population better, we fit a semi-Markov process model to data from the 1992-2002 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. We used an analogue of the stochastic EM algorithm to address the problem of left censoring of spells in longitudinal data....

This article updates trends from five national U.S. surveys to determine whether the prevalence of activity limitations among the older population continued to decline in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Findings across studies suggest that personal care and domestic activity...

The multistate life table (MSLT) model is an important demographic method to document life cycle processes. In this study, we present the SPACE (Stochastic Population Analysis for Complex Events) program to estimate MSLT functions and their sampling variability. It has several advantages over...