Compare methods

	Preston-Coale Method	Life Table
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1982	1984
Originator	Samuel H. Preston & Ansley J. Coale	Demographic/actuarial tradition; Chiang
Type	Death distribution method that reconstructs a population from its deaths to estimate registration completeness	Age-structured mortality estimator
Seminal source	Preston, S. H., & Coale, A. J. (1982). Age structure, growth, attrition, and accession: a new synthesis. Population Index, 48(2), 217–259.	Chiang, C. L. (1984). The Life Table and Its Applications. Robert E. Krieger Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-89874-565-2
Aliases	Synthetic extinct generations method, SEG method, Preston-Coale death distribution method, Preston-Coale Yöntemi	Mortality Table, Actuarial Table, Survival Table, Yaşam Tablosu
Related	4	3
Summary	The Preston-Coale method, also called the synthetic extinct generations method, estimates the completeness of death registration by rebuilding a population from the very deaths it records. Introduced by Samuel Preston and Ansley Coale in 1982, it uses the variable-r relations of a non-stable population to project each age group's future deaths forward, growth-adjust them, and accumulate them into the number of people who must currently be alive at each age. Comparing this implied population with the observed census count reveals what fraction of deaths the vital system actually captures.	A life table is a systematic, age-structured summary of the mortality experience of a population. It traces a hypothetical cohort of births — conventionally 100,000 — through successive age intervals, recording how many survive, how many die, and how many person-years are lived at each interval. The method was formalized in its modern probabilistic form by Chiang (1984), synthesizing centuries of actuarial and demographic practice into a rigorous statistical framework applicable to human and biological populations alike.