what mainly separates an ultimate mortality table from other mortality tables is its exclusion of recently underwritten policies the first few years of life insurance data is usually removed from the analysis to eliminate so called selection effects the rationale here is that people who just received life insurance will often have passed a medical exam and as a result should be statistically healthier and less likely to be on the brink of death than the rest of the general population 
the year raymond pearl introduced the world to mortality tables for the purpose of furthering ecological studies 1 the information underlying ultimate mortality tables is called survivorship data and takes into account many risk factors along with death and survival rates among age groups and sexes mortality tables may also list survival and death rates in relation to weight ethnicity and region some break out statistics for smokers and non smokers too in addition some might include an aggregate mortality table featuring death rate data on the entire study population that has purchased life insurance without a categorization based on age or time of purchase the data in an aggregate table depends on the combined statistics of several if not many individual mortality tables 