Analyzing Child Mortality in Nigeria with Geoadditive Survival Models

Child mortality reflects a country's level of socio-economic
development and quality of life. In developing countries, mortality
rates are not only influenced by socio-economic, demographic and
health variables but they also vary considerably across regions and
districts. In this paper, we analyze child mortality in Nigeria
with flexible geoadditive survival models. This class of models
allows to measure small-area district-specific spatial effects
simultaneously with possibly nonlinear or time-varying effects of
other factors. Inference is fully Bayesian and uses recent Markov
chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. The application is based on
the 1999 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. Our method assesses
effects at a high level of temporal and spatial resolution not
available with traditional parametric models.