Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Thinking Outside The Curve, Part Ii: Modeling Fetal-Infant Mortality, Richard Charnigo, Lorie W. Chesnut, Tony Lobianco, Russell S. Kirby

Statistics Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Greater epidemiologic understanding of the relationships among fetal-infant mortality and its prognostic factors, including birthweight, could have vast public health implications. A key step toward that understanding is a realistic and tractable framework for analyzing birthweight distributions and fetal-infant mortality. The present paper is the second of a two-part series that introduces such a framework.

METHODS: We propose estimating birthweight-specific mortality within each component of a normal mixture model representing a birthweight distribution, the number of components having been determined from the data rather than fixed a priori.

RESULTS: We address a number of methodological issues related to our …