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Comparing hazard models for the growth failure of children in Iran

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Abstract

One of the statistical methods deployed in medical sciences to investigate time to event data is the survival analysis. This study, comparing efficiency of some parametric and semiparametric survival models, aims at investigating the effect of demographic and socio-economic factors on the growth failure of children below 2 years of age in Iran. The survival models including exponential, Weibull, log-logistic and log-normal models were compared to proportional hazards and extended Cox models by Akaike Information Criterion and variability of the estimated parameters. Based on the results, the log-normal model is recommended for analyzing the growth failure data of children in Iran. Furthermore, it is suggested that female children, children born to illiterate mothers and children born in larger households receive more attention in terms of growth failure.

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Acknowledgements

This work was a part of a Ph.D. dissertation in mathematical statistics supported by Amirkabir University. The authors are thankful to the Deputy of Health of Lorestan University of Medical Sciences for providing data for this research. The authors would like to thank the Editor and the two referees for careful reading and comments which improved the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Salehi Veisi & Sadegh Rezaei

  2. School of Mathematics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Saralees Nadarajah

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  1. Mohammad Salehi Veisi
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  2. Sadegh Rezaei
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Correspondence to Sadegh Rezaei.

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Veisi, M.S., Rezaei, S. & Nadarajah, S. Comparing hazard models for the growth failure of children in Iran. Qual Quant 52, 999–1013 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0500-0

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