Compare methods

	Standardized Mortality Ratio	Life Table
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1987	1984
Originator	Classical vital-statistics method (formalized by Breslow & Day)	Demographic/actuarial tradition; Chiang
Type	Ratio of observed to expected deaths under a standard rate schedule	Age-structured mortality estimator
Seminal source	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512	Chiang, C. L. (1984). The Life Table and Its Applications. Robert E. Krieger Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-89874-565-2
Aliases	SMR, Standardised Mortality Ratio, Indirectly Standardized Mortality Ratio	Mortality Table, Actuarial Table, Survival Table, Yaşam Tablosu
Related	4	3
Summary	The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) compares the number of deaths actually observed in a study population with the number that would be expected if that population had experienced a standard set of age-specific death rates. It is the central output of indirect standardization: a single ratio, usually multiplied by 100, that says whether a group's mortality is higher or lower than a reference after accounting for its age structure. Because it needs only the study group's age distribution and total deaths — not stable age-specific rates within the group — the SMR is the method of choice when the group is small or its age-specific deaths are sparse.	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.