Obtaining a Life Table for Spinal Cord Injury Patients Using Information Theory

We present a mortality table adjustment method based on a constrained information theoretic methodology. The objective is to adjust a standard mortality table to reflect a particular known characteristic of the population while remaining as close as possible to a given standard table. To illustrate these techniques, the medical results concerning survival of spinal cord injury patients are incorporated into a standard table to obtain a mortality table pertinent for paraplegic and quadriplegic indiViduals. The desired adjusted mortality table can be used by actuaries for special purposes such as wrongful injury damage award compensation calculations and determining life insurance premium for medically impaired lives.