Forecasting of cohort fertility under a hierarchical Bayesian approach

Fertility projections are a key determinant of population forecasts, which are widely used by government policy makers and planners. In keeping with the recent literature, we propose an intuitive and transparent hierarchical Bayesian model to forecast cohort fertility. Using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods and a data set from the human fertility database, we obtain fertility forecasts for 30 countries. We use scoring rules to assess the predictive accuracy of the forecasts quantitatively; these indicate that our model predicts with an accuracy comparable with that of the best‐performing models in the current literature overall, with stronger performance for countries without a recent structural shift. Our findings support the position of hierarchical Bayesian modelling at the forefront of population forecasting methods.