On the theory of mortality measurement

Abstract 2.1. Limitations of the parametric methods. In the previous sections we have studied the efficiency of various methods of estimating the force of mortality. The most efficient of these is, at least for large samples, the one given by the maximum likelihood method, and the rest of them have to be compared to this best estimate. However in this discussion the notion of efficiency is based on the assumption that the mortality intensity can be expressed by Makeham's formula. How realistic is this in practice?