Statistical-Demographic Analysis of Infant’s Mortality in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study was aimed at evaluating the infant’s mortality according to the available data from General Hospital, Shomolu, Lagos. Data were collected from the hospital records from 2009 to 2018 (ten years) with approval given by the Lagos State Health Service Commission. The data describe the age and gender distributions of the mortality recorded as well as the time index. The series is a monthly data type of record which captures the mortality at regular interval. The significance of the gender mortality variations was put to test in order to evaluate if the difference observable has any concrete information it holds. However, it was observed using independent T-test at alpha level of 0.01 that, there is no significant difference between average death of male babies and female babies. Furthermore, chi-square test for independence was used to evaluate the dependence between the age and gender factors and was observed that, there is no dependence between age and gender factors. Time series analysis was therefore employed to study the trend of the data as well as to assess the stationarity status of the series. The ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) was employed to model the series and forecast of future expected occurrence was done. It was noted from the forecasted report that, there will be a slight reduction in infant mortality for the year 2019-2022. Since there is a slight reduction in the prediction for the year 2019 – 2022, more efforts should be put into training the medical staff as well as provide improved infrastructural facilities in order to maintain the reduced infant’s mortality rate or bring it down to zero level.