predictors of the number of under-five malnourished children in bangladesh application of the generalized poisson regression model孟加拉国的5岁以下儿童营养不良的儿童数量预测的应用广义泊松回归模型.pdfVIP

Islam et al. BMC Public Health 2013, 13:11 /1471-2458/13/11 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Predictors of the number of under-five malnourished children in Bangladesh: application of the generalized poisson regression model 1,2 1 3 1,4 5 Mohammad Mafijul Islam , Morshed Alam , Md Tariquzaman , Mohammad Alamgir Kabir , Rokhsona Pervin , Munni Begum6 and Md Mobarak Hossain Khan7* Abstract Background: Malnutrition is one of the principal causes of child mortality in developing countries including Bangladesh. According to our knowledge, most of the available studies, that addressed the issue of malnutrition among under-five children, considered the categorical (dichotomous/polychotomous) outcome variables and applied logistic regression (binary/multinomial) to find their predictors. In this study malnutrition variable (i.e. outcome) is defined as the number of under-five malnourished children in a family, which is a non-negative count variable. The purposes of the study are (i) to demonstrate the applicability of the generalized Poisson regression (GPR) model as an alternative of other statistical methods and (ii) to find some predictors of this outcome variable. Methods: The data is extracted from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2007. Briefly, this survey employs a nationally representative sample which is based on a two-stage stratified sample of households. A total of 4,460 under-five children is analysed using various statistical techniques namely Chi-square test and GPR model. Results: The GPR model (as compared to the standard Poisso n regression and negative Binomial regres