where i—market, j—customer, and k—week . That is: mortijk is the k-th week mortality claimed by customer j at market i. View the MathML source is a parameter representing the mean of all observations. αi, uj, and vik are the mean deviations from View the MathML source of the mortality claims in market, customer and market-week respectively. εijk, the error term, is the deviation of mortality claims of the j-th customer at market i in week k from the weekly mean of mortality claims reported from market i in week k