MSI Weekly Bulletin - Week starting Monday 16 April, 2007

We use a mixture of two life distributions arising from reliability study to investigate, via a comparative analysis of data from New Zealand on Maori and non-Maori mortality, whether more information than just life expectancy can be extracted from this data. The curvature functions of the corresponding survival and hazard rate functions are used to identify the beginning and the end of various life phases, such as infant mortality. Australian researchers and policy makers may also be interested in understanding, and thus finding ways to rectify, health and other inequities between indigenous and non-indigenous sub-populations.