Mohamed Al-Osh

Overview

Mohamed Al-Osh was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s. He developed a birth forecasting framework based on parity transition probabilities, published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1986, and contributed earlier related work on birth order time series models (Al-Osh 1982, 1984).

Key Contributions

• Introduced parity transition probabilities $p_{j,t}$ as the forecasting primitive for fertility projections, replacing volatile age-specific fertility rates
• Demonstrated that Feeney's (1983) parity progression model and the Lee-Saboia-McDonald renewal equation models are special cases of this framework
• Achieved substantially lower RMSE (5.31% vs. 22.36% for the next-best competitor) in U.S. birth forecasting

Related

• Parity Transition Probabilities
• Al-Osh 1986 — Birth Forecasting Based on Birth Order Probabilities
• Lee-Carter Model