The significance of mortality modeling extends across multiple research areas, including life insurance valuation, longevity risk management, life-cycle hypothesis, and retirement income planning. Despite the variety of existing approaches, such as mortality laws and factor-based models, they often lack compatibility or fail to meet specific research needs. To address these shortcomings, this study introduces a novel approach centered on modeling the dynamics of individual vitality and defining mortality as the depletion of vitality level to zero. More specifically, we develop a four-component framework to analyze the initial value, trend, diffusion, and sudden changes in vitality level over an individual's lifetime. We demonstrate the framework's estimation and analytical capabilities in various settings and discuss its practical implications in actuarial problems and other research areas. The broad applicability and interpretability of our vitality-based modeling approach offer an enhanced paradigm for mortality modeling.

翻译：死亡率建模的重要性贯穿于多个研究领域，包括寿险定价、长寿风险管理、生命周期假说以及退休收入规划。尽管存在多种现有方法，如死亡率定律和基于因子的模型，但它们往往缺乏兼容性或无法满足特定的研究需求。为弥补这些不足，本研究提出了一种以个体活力动态建模为核心的新方法，并将死亡定义为活力水平耗尽至零。更具体而言，我们开发了一个四组分框架，用于分析个体生命周期中活力水平的初始值、趋势、扩散和突变。我们在多种设定下展示了该框架的估计与分析能力，并讨论了其在精算问题及其他研究领域的实际意义。我们这种基于活力的建模方法具有广泛的适用性和可解释性，为死亡率建模提供了一个增强的范式。