Complex Survival System Modeling for Risk Assessment of Infant Mortality Using a Parametric Approach

Abstract

Pakistan is still one of the five countries contributing to half of the child deaths worldwide and holds a low ratio of infant survival. A high rate of poverty, low level of education, limited health facilities, rural-urban inequalities, and political uncertainty are the main reasons for this condition. Survival models that evaluate the performance of models over simulated and real data set may serve as an effective technique to determine accurate complex systems. The present study proposed an efficient extension of the recent parametric technique for risk assessment of infant mortality to address complex survival systems in the presence of extreme observations. This extended method integrated four distributions with the basic algorithm using a real data set of infant survival without extreme observations. The proposed models are compared with the standard partial least squares-Cox regression (PLS-CoxR), and higher efficiency of these proposed algorithms is observed for handling complex survival time systems for risk assessment. The algorithm is also used to analyze simulated data set for further verification of results. The optimal model revealed that the mother’s age, type of residence, wealth index, permission to go to a medical facility, distance to a health facility, and awareness about tuberculosis significantly affected the survival time of infants. The flexibility and continuity of extended parametric methods support the implementation of public health surveillance data effectively for data-oriented evaluation. The findings may support projecting targeted interventions, producing awareness, and implementing policies planned to reduce infant mortality.