Choose an individual uniformly from the population. The law of total probability gives the population density and survivor function as mixtures:
A hazard function is a ratio of density to survival, so averaging the densities does not average those ratios. Instead,
These are the proportions of the original individual types among those still event-free at , rather than their equal starting proportions. For example, a mixture of different exponential distributions progressively favours the lower-rate individuals. This population hazard of a survival mixture generally differs from .