A holistic statistical approach for determining the relationships between social, economic and health markers using the English Longitudinal Study...

人们早就认识到，像英国这样的发达社会的人口结构正在发生根本性的变化，人们的寿命更长，因此在老年时期身体虚弱的时间更长。这对经济和劳动力动态以及社会福利制度有着直接的影响（Tinker, 2002）。人们正在作出越来越多的努力来提高我们对这一新现象的理解。从定义上讲，人口是由各种各样的实体组成的，因此，为了了解个人的需求和量化未来任何政策变化的影响，描述老龄化的不同经历是至关重要的。与此同时，由于技术的进步，数据收集出现了爆炸式的增长，这可以用来提高我们对老龄化过程的更精细的理解，并有助于个人和政策层面的决策。然而，由于被称为“维度诅咒”的问题，这些技术进步也为分析如此丰富的信息带来了新的挑战。这表明，在高维上下文中（许多观察到的变量），任何标准分析都成为一项重要的任务。此外，即使在大数据时代，也不可能收集到表征个体变异性的所有相关信息，而且变异性和噪声水平甚至可能随着测量次数的增加而增加。

It has long been recognized that the demographics of developed societies such as Britain are undergoing a fundamental change, with people living longer lives, and as a consequence experiencing a longer period of frailty in old age. This has immediate implications for economy and labour force dynamics, as well as the social welfare system (Tinker, 2002). Increasing efforts are being made to improve our understanding of this new phenomenon. As the population, by definition, is a mixture of very heterogeneous entities, it is vital to characterise the varying experiences of ageing in order to understand the needs of individuals and to quantify the impacts of any future policy changes. In parallel, due to advancement in technology, there has been an explosive growth in data collection, which could be utilised to improve our understanding of the ageing process on a finer scale and to aid both individual and policy-level decision making. However, these technological advancements also bring new challenges to analyse such rich information, due to the problem known as the "curse of dimensionality". This states that any standard analysis becomes a non-trivial task in a high dimensional context (many observed variables). Additionally, even in the era of big data, it is impossible to collect all the relevant information that characterises individual variability, and variability and noise levels may even increase with increasing number of measurements.