Document Type

Article

Journal Title

Biometrics & Biostatistics International Journal

Publication Date

2014

Volume

1

Abstract

Efforts to reduce the number of children’s death in developing countries through health care programs focus more to the prevention and control of diseases than to determining the underlying risk factors/predictors and addressing these through proper interventions. This study aims to identify socioeconomic and demographic predictors of the number of children’s death to women aged 12-49 from the Bangladesh Health and Demographic Survey (BDHS) administered in 2011. The number of children’s death in a family is a non-negative count response variable. The average number of children’s death is found to be 28 per 100 women with a variance of 44per 100 women. Thus Poisson regression model is not a proper choice to predict the mean response from the BDHS data due to the presence of over-dispersion. In order to address over-dispersion, we fit a Negative Binomial Regression (NBR), a Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression (ZINBR) and a Hurdle Regression (HR) model. Among these models, ZINBR fits the data best. We identify respondent’s age, respondent’s age at 1st birth, gap between 1st birth and marriage, number of family members, region, religion, respondent’s education, husband’s education, incidence of twins, source of water, and wealth index as significant predictors for the number of children’s death in a family from the best fitted model. Identification of the risk factors of the number of children’s death is an important public health issue and should be carried out correctly for the much needed intervention.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Download

Included in

Biostatistics Commons

Share

COinS