Predicting the development of a homogeneous population in an industrialized country.

The development of the Finnish population has been studied in order to predict its probable changes in the 21st century. More generally, the proposed iterative prediction procedure is useful for homogeneous populations in developed countries. The Finnish population is favorable for demographic studies because there exists accurate Finnish population data for a long historical period. Since several factors, for example natality, mortality, average female fertility and standard of living, have an impact on population, its modeling and prediction is an intricate matter. First, neural networks that are often efficient for nonlinear, complex systems were tried. However, it was found that there were far too many input parameters and a critical shortage of data to train and test neural networks. Instead, a straightforward, iterative procedure to predict the future development of the Finnish population was created, in particular giving its probable upper and lower limits.