CIGANDA, DANIEL
, Ignacio Campón-Villamayor
, Iñaki Permanyer
, Jakob H Macke
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society), 2025
Palabras clave:
simulation based inference individual level modelling age specific fertility rates microsimulation sequential neural posterior estimation Areas de conocimiento:
Ciencias Naturales y Exactas / Matemáticas /
Estadística y Probabilidad /
Ciencias Sociales / Otras Ciencias Sociales /
Otras Ciencias Sociales /
Ciencias Naturales y Exactas / Ciencias de la Computación e Información /
Ciencias de la Computación /
Medio de divulgación: Internet
ISSN: 09641998
E-ISSN: 1467985X
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnag045 Age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) provide the most extensive record of reproductive change, but their aggregate nature obscures the individual-level behavioral mechanisms that drive fertility trends. To bridge this micro-macro divide, we introduce a
likelihood-free Bayesian framework that couples a demographically interpretable, individuallevel simulation model of the reproductive process with Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (SNPE). We show that this framework successfully recovers core behavioral
parameters governing contemporary fertility, including preferences for family size, reproductive timing, and contraceptive failure, using only ASFRs. The framework?s effectiveness is validated on cohorts from four countries with diverse fertility regimes.
Most compellingly, the model, estimated solely on aggregate data, successfully predicts
out-of-sample distributions of individual-level outcomes, including age at first sex, desired family size, and birth intervals. Because our framework yields complete synthetic
life histories, it significantly reduces the data requirements for building microsimulation
models and enables behaviorally explicit demographic forecasts.