Beta kernel graduation of mortality data in R. An application to the Enna province

Various approaches have been proposed in literature for the kernel graduation of mortality rates. Among them, this paper considers the fixed bandwidth discrete beta kernel estimator, a recent proposal conceived to intrinsically reduce boundary bias and in which age is pragmatically considered as a discrete variable. In this paper, we present an implementation of this estimator for the R statistical environment. An application to 2009 female mortality data from Enna (Italy) is also presented.