Infant Weight-Specific Mortality: Degenerate Mixture vs. Non-Degenerate Mixture

• Activity Number: 422
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Eric Yaw Frimpong*+ and Timothy Gage and Howard Stratton
• Companies: U.S. Food and Drug Administration and The State University of New York at Albany and The State University of New York at Albany
• Keywords: Birth weight ; Infant mortality ; degenerate mixtures ; non-degenerate mixtures

Abstract

To estimate the level of unobserved heterogeneity in infant weight specific mortality, several mixture models have been developed. Birth weight has been established as the most predictive factor in infant mortality. The marginal of the covariate, birth weight has been considered in both a degenerate mixture and a non-degenerate mixture. There has been considerable interest in the role of birth weight and/or gestational period in the mixture formulation. To explore this question, real Birth/Death data sets obtained from National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and simulations are used to investigate total mortality based on the mixture formulations. Hazard rate functions such as Weibull, Gompertz and Gamma are considered. Mixture formulations of these different distributions are also examined by simulations.