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Reducing the global burden of stillbirths is important to improving child and maternal health. Of interest is understanding patterns in the timing of stillbirths -- that is, whether they occur in the intra- or antepartum period -- because…
Since the 1940s, population projections have in most cases been produced using the deterministic cohort component method. However, in 2015, for the first time, in a major advance, the United Nations issued official probabilistic population…
Unintended pregnancy and abortion estimates are needed to inform and motivate investment in global health programmes and policies. Variability in the availability and reliability of data poses challenges for producing estimates. We…
The sex ratio at birth (SRB) is defined as the ratio of male to female live births. The SRB imbalance in parts of the world over the past several decades is a direct consequence of sex-selective abortion, driven by the co-existence of son…
This paper sets out a forecasting method that employs a mixture of parametric functions to capture the pattern of fertility with respect to age. The overall level of cohort fertility is decomposed over the range of fertile ages using a…
Accuracy in fertility forecasting has proved challenging and warrants renewed attention. One way to improve accuracy is to combine the strengths of a set of existing models through model averaging. The model-averaged forecast is derived…
We consider the problem of probabilistic projection of the total fertility rate (TFR) for subnational regions. We seek a method that is consistent with the UN's recently adopted Bayesian method for probabilistic TFR projections for all…
Estimates of the under-five mortality rate (U5MR) are used to track progress in reducing child mortality and to evaluate countries' performance related to Millennium Development Goal 4. However, for the great majority of developing…
In recent years, much of the focus in monitoring child mortality has been on assessing changes in the under-five mortality rate (U5MR). However, as the U5MR decreases, the share of neonatal deaths (within the first month) tends to increase,…
The accelerating shift toward low and ultra-low fertility has intensified the debate over whether countries now undergoing rapid decline are approaching stabilization or entering a more persistent low-fertility regime. Existing projection…
Undernutrition, resulting in restricted growth, and quantified here using height-for-age z-scores, is an important contributor to childhood morbidity and mortality. Since all levels of mild, moderate and severe undernutrition are of…
Most estimates for penalised linear regression can be viewed as posterior modes for an appropriate choice of prior distribution. Bayesian shrinkage methods, particularly the horseshoe estimator, have recently attracted a great deal of…
Many people living in low- and middle-income countries are not covered by civil registration and vital statistics systems. Consequently, a wide variety of other types of data, including many household sample surveys, are used to estimate…
The United Nations (UN) Population Division is considering producing probabilistic projections for the total fertility rate (TFR) using the Bayesian hierarchical model of Alkema et al. (2011), which produces predictive distributions of TFR…
A rapid decline in mortality and fertility has become major issues in many developed countries over the past few decades. A precise model for forecasting demographic movements is important for decision making in social welfare policies and…
The bayesTFR package for R provides a set of functions to produce probabilistic projections of the total fertility rates (TFR) for all countries, and is widely used, including as part of the basis for the UN's official population…
Preterm births occur at an alarming rate of 10-15%. Preemies have a higher risk of infant mortality, developmental retardation and long-term disabilities. Predicting preterm birth is difficult, even for the most experienced clinicians. The…
Accurate estimates of subnational populations are important for policy formulation and monitoring population health indicators. For example, estimates of the number of women of reproductive age are important to understand the population at…
Analysing age-specific mortality, fertility, and migration patterns is a crucial task in demography with significant policy relevance. In practice, such analysis is challenging when studying a large number of subpopulations, due to small…
Several demographic and health indicators, including the total fertility rate (TFR) and modern contraceptive use rate (mCPR), evolve similarly over time, characterized by a transition between stable states. Existing approaches for…