A New Socio-Economic Mortality Index for England

We describe a  that explains socio-economic variation in mortality risk over the small geographical units in England.  Mortality is analysed at neighbourhood level (Lower Layer Super Output Areas, LSOA), with connection to a number of socio-economic factors that are selected for having strong interaction with mortality. With the observed mortalities and socio-economic factors in each LSOA, we create the index as a function of socio-economic factors, by gender and age, using an explicitly designed random forest model. This index quantifies mortality risk level in single LSOAs relative to others and the national average mortality risk in England.  It helps assess distribution of relative mortality risk over different areas in England, and reveals the most significant socio-economic factors that relate to mortality differences. For mortality analysis, this index can be considered as an improved alternative to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) published by the ONS. 

We find that income, employment, education, housing affordability and living environment are the most significant socio-economic factors that contribute to variation of mortality risk across the LSOAs in England. Besides socio-economics, level of urbanisation, presence of care homes and spatial location also have significant impact on neighbourhood mortality.