PAPER TITLE :BAYESIAN SEMIPARAMETRIC MODELLING OF DETERMINANTS OF STUNTING IN NIGERIA

FUTA JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE | VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2 2017

Paper Details

  • Author(s) : * O. A. Olalude, O. E. Olubusoye and O. O. Alaba
  • Abstract:

The effect of childhood malnutrition varies across geographical location in any given country. Studies on childhood malnutrition without geographic information mask the spatial effect. This study explores the spatial effect and the determinants of stunting in Nigeria.
Using the 2013 Nigerian Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) data, we specified a model that simultaneously measures the fixed effect of categorical covariates, nonlinear effect of continuous variable, spatial effect and random effect of the community and households using the diffuse prior, the P-spline with second-order random walk, Markov random field prior and the exchangeable normal priors respectively. The dependent variable was specified as 1 if a child under five years (U5) is stunted and 0 otherwise. The logistic distribution was used to capture the binomial distribution of the dependent variable; the choices of hyperparameters were varied to check for the sensitivity of the priors on the posterior distribution. Using estimation criterion: Odd Ratio (OR) and Confidence Interval (CI), North East (OR: 1.5232, CI: 1.7160, 2.0431) and North West (OR: 1.0241, CI: 1.0542, 1.1645) show that the North Eastern and Western regions account more for stunted children in Nigeria. Secondary (OR: 0.8126, CI: 0.7344, 0.8511), higher (OR: 0.7279, CI: 0.5475, 0.7440) explain significant lower odds of U5 who are stunted with women who are educated. Also, stunting of the children under five of women in states like Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Edo, and Enugu are likely to be less compare to the children under five in Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara , Kaduna, Kano, Lagos and Jigawa. The posterior distributions are less sensitive to variations in the choices of priors. The ameliorating measures should channeled towards the affected regions in the country which are the North Eastern and Western regions
Keywords: Binomial, Geo additive model, Nigeria, Prior, Posterior, Stunting