Reprospective Analysis of Some Factors Responsible for Infant Mortality in Nigeria: Evidence from Nigeria Demographic and Health Survy (NDHS)

This study is a retrospective analysis of the reproductive history data collected from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys (NDHS) for 2013 to study some factors that are likely to be responsible for infant mortality. The essential aim of this study is to estimate the survival rates of infant’s mortality in Nigeria with the objectives of estimating and interpreting survivor/hazard function from survival data, describing and estimating the survival experience of different groups, selecting the best hazard model from the data. The Kaplan- Meier curve was plotted to describe the rate of survival of some of the factors responsible for infant mortality. The log- rank test which is a non-parametric test was used to test the hypothesis to compare the survival distributions of the samples. The log rank test was obtained for the region, type of resident, sex of the child, religion, gender, highest educational level of mother, wealth index, Age at death, age at birth. The Cox-Proportional Hazard Model was fitted to assess the importance of various covariates in the survival times of infant through the hazard ratio. The hazard ratio which was used to interpret the cox proportional model is compare on its closeness to 1. Also testing the significant of the covariate to the model using the p-value if less than 0.05 level of significant.