Life Tables

A life table describes, in terms of various life table functions, the probability distribution of duration time in a tabular form. Duration time is the time interval from an initial time point to the occurrence of a point event such as death or incidence of disease. A point event is a transition from one state to another. For example, death is a transition from the alive state (a transient state) to the dead state (an absorbing state). If the initial time point is taken as birth and the point event as death, then the time interval from birth to deathiscalledthe life length or age-at-death, and the life table that describes the distribution of the age-atdeath is also called a mortality table (particularly by actuaries). In ...