Estimation of life expectancies using continuous-time multi-state models

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE There is increasing interest in multi-state modelling of health-related stochastic processes. Given a fitted multi-state model with one death state, it is possible to estimate state-specific and marginal life expectancies. This paper introduces methods and new software for computing these expectancies. METHODS The definition of state-specific life expectancy given current age is an extension of mean survival in standard survival analysis. The computation involves the estimated parameters of a fitted multi-state model, and numerical integration. The new R package elect provides user-friendly functions to do the computation in the R software. RESULTS The estimation of life expectancies is explained and illustrated using the elect package. Functions are presented to explore the data, to estimate the life expectancies, and to present results. CONCLUSIONS State-specific life expectancies provide a communicable representation of health-related processes. The availability and explanation of the elect package will help researchers to compute life expectancies and to present their findings in an assessable way.

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