Probabilistic Approaches to Current Life Table Estimation

Two simple current life table estimators of conditional probabilities of death result from making either a uniform or exponential distributional assumption of time at death in the age interval.Each is compared with Chiang's estimator based on the concept of fraction of the last age interval of life.Graphical and numerical results are presented to assess the magnitude and direction of differences between estimators when the true value of Chiang's fraction takes on specific values.