Probabilistic population forecasts for small regions

BACKGROUND: Age-specific population forecasts for small areas or subnational regions are a valuable tool for local governments. However, typical population projection methods based on the cohort-component approach are difficult to apply on a smaller subnational scale. OBJECTIVE: We introduce Bayesian methods suitable for obtaining reliable age-specific population forecasts for small regions using the cohort-component method. METHODS: Our approach improves fertility forecasting by extending the Lee–Carter model with an age-region interaction term. We propose to forecast net-migration counts using skewed error terms, and introduce a Dirichlet regression to model migration age patterns as well as age proportions of fertility. RESULTS: We run our model to produce age-specific population forecasts for a set of 13 heterogeneous regions in Bavaria, Germany. We compare our method with other standard approaches and find that it produces superior out-of-sample forecasts according to both point measures and scoring rules. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that the proposed Bayesian methods offer good predictive accuracy and are suitable in obtaining precise forecasts of age-specific population for smaller geo-graphical regions. CONTRIBUTION: We introduce a new method for the probabilistic projection of subnational population that works well and outperforms other current methods.