Mortality by month & year 2000 – 2021 (part 1)

England & Wales monthly mortality by quinary age band & sex: spaghetti plots for males under 45y

There’s nothing more exciting to a statistician specialising in time series analysis than a good-looking time series. Up to now I’ve presented a truck load of monthly time series plots for the period 1970 – 2021 and we’ve worked our way through red dots, wiggly green lines, smooth orange lines and smooth sea green lines. Not everybody is used to eyeballing such complex patterns within time so this morning I thought I’d switch from baking all manner of time-based confectionery to cooking spaghetti.

To do this I’ve sliced the contiguous time series data up by year and month and produced a series of what I shall call spaghetti plots for all 36 possible age and sex combinations. These should be fairly self-explanatory. Tuck your napkin in, grab the Parmesan and have a taste of these…

It would seem than 0 – 4y males are enjoying the safest two years in the last twenty!