Related papers: Estimating the timing of stillbirths in countries …

Objective: Cause-of-death distributions are important for prioritising interventions. We estimated proportions, risks, and numbers of deaths (with uncertainty) for programme-relevant causes of neonatal death for 194 countries for 2000-2013,…

Motivation: Recent advances in technology for brain imaging and high-throughput genotyping have motivated studies examining the influence of genetic variation on brain structure. Wang et al. (Bioinformatics, 2012) have developed an approach…

Penalized B-splines are routinely used in additive models to describe smooth changes in a response with quantitative covariates. It is typically done through the conditional mean in the exponential family using generalized additive models…

The determination of the shapes of mortality curves, the estimation and projection of mortality patterns over time, and the investigation of differences in mortality patterns across different small underdeveloped populations have received…

Existing datasets available to address crucial problems, such as child mortality and family planning discontinuation in developing countries, are not ample for data-driven approaches. This is partly due to disjoint data collection efforts…

This paper proposes a Bayesian hierarchical model to characterize the relationship between birth weight and maternal pre-eclampsia across gestation at a large maternity hospital in urban Uganda. Key scientific questions we investigate…

Improving health worldwide will require rigorous quantification of population-level trends in health status. However, global-level surveys are not available, forcing researchers to rely on fragmentary country-specific data of varying…

Child mortality is an important population health indicator. However, many countries lack high-quality vital registration to measure child mortality rates precisely and reliably over time. Research endeavors such as those by the United…

Understanding patterns in mortality across subpopulations is essential for local health policy decision making. One of the key challenges of subnational mortality rate estimation is the presence of small populations and zero or near zero…

Although traditional literature on mortality modeling has focused on single countries in isolation, recent contributions have progressively moved toward joint models for multiple countries. Besides favoring borrowing of information to…

In all areas of human knowledge, datasets are increasing in both size and complexity, creating the need for richer statistical models. This trend is also true for economic data, where high-dimensional and nonlinear/nonparametric inference…

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…

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…

Observational time series data often exhibit both cyclic temporal trends and autocorrelation and may also depend on covariates. As such, there is a need for flexible regression models that are able to capture these trends and model any…

In this report we review modern nonlinearity methods that can be used in the preterm birth analysis. The nonlinear analysis of uterine contraction signals can provide information regarding physiological changes during the menstrual cycle…

Babies born with low and very low birthweights -- i.e., birthweights below 2,500 and 1,500 grams, respectively -- have an increased risk of complications compared to other babies, and the proportion of babies with a low birthweight is a…

It has historically been a challenge to perform Bayesian inference in a design-based survey context. The present paper develops a Bayesian model for sampling inference in the presence of inverse-probability weights. We use a hierarchical…

Preterm birth is the most common cause of neonatal death. Current diagnostic methods that assess the risk of preterm birth involve the collection of maternal characteristics and transvaginal ultrasound imaging conducted in the first and…

This work introduces a Bayesian smoothing approach for the joint graduation of mortality rates across multiple populations. In particular, dynamical linear models are used to induce smoothness across ages through structured dependence,…

Clustering is a crucial task in various domains of knowledge, including medicine, epidemiology, genomics, environmental science, economics, and visual sciences, among others. Methodologies for inferring the number of clusters have often…