Modeling and forecasting of the under-five mortality rate in Kermanshah province in Iran: a time series analysis

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

OBJECTIVES: The target of the Fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG-4) is to reduce the rate of un-der-five mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. Despite substantial progress towards achieving the target of the MDG-4 in Iran at the national level, differences at the sub-national levels should be taken into consideration.
METHODS: The under-five mortality data available from the Deputy of Public Health, Kermanshah Universi-ty of Medical Sciences, was used in order to perform a time series analysis of the monthly under-five mortality rate (U5MR) from 2005 to 2012 in Kermanshah province in the west of Iran. After primary analysis, a season-al auto-regressive integrated moving average model was chosen as the best fitting model based on model se-lection criteria.
RESULTS: The model was assessed and proved to be adequate in describing variations in the data. However, the unexpected presence of a stochastic increasing trend and a seasonal component with a periodicity of six months in the fitted model are very likely to be consequences of poor quality of data collection and reporting systems.
CONCLUSIONS: The present work is the first attempt at time series modeling of the U5MR in Iran, and re-veals that improvement of under-five mortality data collection in health facilities and their corresponding sys-tems is a major challenge to fully achieving the MGD-4 in Iran. Studies similar to the present work can en-hance the understanding of the invisible patterns in U5MR, monitor progress towards the MGD-4, and predict the impact of future variations on the U5MR.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• INTRODUCTION
• MATERIALS AND METHODS
• RESULTS
• DISCUSSION
• REFERENCES