Probability of Cause of Death via Mortality Rate

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Working on a statistics project, I wanted to get this correct.
The suicide rate in the United States is $\frac{14}{100,000}/year$
If the United States has a population of $335 \cdot 10^6$, and there are $2,838,240$ deaths per year, this would result in $1.65\%$ of deaths.
Probability of selected person eventually dying by suicide would be $1.65\%$, or $0.014\%$?

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Not enough information:

  • First, people live longer than a single year (for instance you, unless you're an amazing prodigy violating SE EULA)

  • Second, whether a person commit suicide and how long he/she lives are (clearly) not independent events (people only commit suicides (successfully) in the last year of their lives)

  • Third, the age of a person and whether he/she commits suicide are not independent events (not much people intentionally commit suicide at age 2; and unintententional suicides are not called suicides)

Hence we would need more data to determined said probability, likely requiring surveys.


In order to prevent the X-Y problem... what are you actually trying to accomplish?