Analyzing Infant Mortality in Rural Bangladesh: A Frailty Modeling Approach

Abstract

In practice, it may happen that data may arise from a hierarchical structure i.e., a cluster is nested within another cluster. In this case, nested frailty model is appropriate to analyze survival data to obtain optimal estimates of the parameters of interest. To identify significant determinants of infant mortality in rural Bangladesh, survival data have been extracted from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS), 2014. Because of the presence of two-level clustering in data, nested frailty model has been employed for the purpose of analysis. Recommendations have been suggested based on the results obtained from the survival model to reduce the infant mortality in rural Bangladesh to a great extent.