Thinking outside the curve, part I: modeling birthweight distribution.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Greater epidemiologic understanding of the relationships among fetal-infant mortality and its prognostic factors, including birthweight, could have vast public health implications. A key step toward that understanding is a realistic and tractable framework for analyzing birthweight distributions and fetal-infant mortality. The present paper is the first of a two-part series that introduces such a framework.

Methods

We propose describing a birthweight distribution via a normal mixture model in which the number of components is determined from the data using a model selection criterion rather than fixed a priori.

Results

We address a number of methodological issues, including how the number of components selected depends on the sample size, how the choice of

SUBMITTER: Charnigo R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2927479 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature