Bayesian factor models for probabilistic cause of death assessment with verbal autopsies

03/04/2018
by   Tsuyoshi Kunihama, et al.
0

The distribution of deaths by cause provides crucial information for public health planning, response, and evaluation. About 60% of deaths globally are not registered or given a cause which limits our ability to understand the epidemiology of affected populations. Verbal autopsy (VA) surveys are increasingly used in such settings to collect information on the signs, symptoms, and medical history of people who have recently died. This article develops a novel Bayesian method for estimation of population distributions of deaths by cause using verbal autopsy data. The proposed approach is based on a multivariate probit model where associations among items in questionnaires are flexibly induced by latent factors. We measure strength of conditional dependence of symptoms with causes. Using the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium labeled data that include both VA and medically certified causes of death, we assess performance of the proposed method. Further, we propose a method to estimate important questionnaire items that are highly associated with causes of death. This framework provides insights that will simplify future data collection.

READ FULL TEXT

page 17

page 18

page 19

page 21

page 29

page 30

page 31

research
12/22/2021

Bayesian Nested Latent Class Models for Cause-of-Death Assignment using Verbal Autopsies Across Multiple Domains

Understanding cause-specific mortality rates is crucial for monitoring p...
research
02/16/2023

Bayesian Active Questionnaire Design for Cause-of-Death Assignment Using Verbal Autopsies

Only about one-third of the deaths worldwide are assigned a medically-ce...
research
09/16/2021

The openVA Toolkit for Verbal Autopsies

Verbal autopsy (VA) is a survey-based tool widely used to infer cause of...
research
12/21/2021

Tree-informed Bayesian multi-source domain adaptation: cross-population probabilistic cause-of-death assignment using verbal autopsy

Determining causes of deaths (COD) occurred outside of civil registratio...
research
02/21/2018

A Guide to Comparing the Performance of VA Algorithms

The literature comparing the performance of algorithms for assigning cau...
research
01/13/2021

Estimating causes of maternal death in data-sparse contexts

Understanding the underlying causes of maternal death across all regions...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset