Biom Biostat Int J 2014, 1(3): 00014 Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com Biometrics & Biostatistics International Journal maternal age and education are found to be strongly correlated with child morality [1,5-11]. Although the relationship between parental education and the number of children’s death is complex, a number of studies have illustrated that children of less educated parents tend to have a higher mortality rate than children of well- educated ones [6,9,10-13]. Parental education, more importantly maternal education, is identified as a strong predictor of child morality [5,9-11]. Other determinants of child mortality may include rural-urban residency [1,3,11,13,14], number of children in a household [1,3,14], water source [1,12] and toilet facility [1,5,11,14]. Most of these studies related to children’s mortality and children’s survival used proportional hazards models and multivariable logistic regression [8]. For instance, Bhuiya et al. [8] applied a proportional hazard models to study strong relationships with childhood mortality in Bangladesh. Majumder et al. [9] used multivariate analysis to identify socioeconomic and environmental determinants of children survival in Bangladesh. Chowdhury et al. [11] used multivariate proportional hazards models to find covariates that associated with neonatal and post-neonatal mortality in Bangladesh. Some studies addressed the number of malnourished children [2-5]. As no literature is available to the best of our knowledge regarding total number of children’s death among the women of age group 12-49 years in Bangladesh, we attempt to explore the nature of the number of children’s deaths and to identify associated risk factors/ covariates in this study. A number of regression models for the count response, namely, standard Poisson Regression model, Negative Binomial Abbreviations BDHS: Bangladesh Health and Demographic Survey; NBR: Negative Binomial Regression; ZINBR: Zero-Inflated Negative; Binomial Regression; HR: Hurdle Regression Introduction Reduction of child mortality is one of the prime objectives of the southeastern Asian nation Bangladesh. Bangladesh has made impressive progress in health and human development since its emergence as an independent nation in 1971 [1,2]. Although the country achieved significant improvement in public health and in controlling the morbidities and mortalities from preventable diseases, child mortality is still a major public health issue. Every year between 8 and 11 million children die worldwide before reaching their fifth birthday [3]. The underlying cause for 60% of the deaths of children under the age five in Bangladesh is malnutrition [3,4].The primary objective of the current study is to identify socioeconomic and demographic risk factors/ predictors of the number of children’s death for women aged 12- 49 from the Bangladesh Health and Demographic Survey (BDHS) administered in 2011. It is useful for the policymakers to have a set of risk factors of the number of children’s death in order to develop guidelines and address these risk factors with proper intervention. Framing proper guidelines and policies to reduce child mortality will insure the sustainability of achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) [4] relating child mortality. In terms of demographic and socioeconomic determinants, Statistical Modeling of the Number of Deaths of Children in Bangladesh Research Article Volume 1 Issue 3 - 2014 Moshed Alam 1,2 , Manzur Rahman Farazi 1,2 , Joseph Stiglitz 2 and Munni Begum 2 * 1 Department of Statistics, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh 2 Department of Mathematical Sciences, Ball State University, Indiana *Corresponding author: Munni Begum, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Ball State University, Indiana, Tel: 1-765-285-8673; Email: Received: November 12, 2014 | Published: December 11, 2014 Abstract Efforts to reduce the number of children’s death in developing countries through health care programs focus more to the prevention and control of diseases than to determining the underlying risk factors/predictors and addressing these through proper interventions. This study aims to identify socioeconomic and demographic predictors of the number of children’s death to women aged 12-49 from the Bangladesh Health and Demographic Survey (BDHS) administered in 2011. The number of children’s death in a family is a non-negative count response variable. The average number of children’s death is found to be 28 per 100 women with a variance of 44per 100 women. Thus Poisson regression model is not a proper choice to predict the mean response from the BDHS data due to the presence of over-dispersion. In order to address over-dispersion, we fit a Negative Binomial Regression (NBR), a Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression (ZINBR) and a Hurdle Regression (HR) model. Among these models, ZINBR fits the data best. We identify respondent’s age, respondent’s age at 1 st birth, gap between 1 st birth and marriage, number of family members, region, religion, respondent’s education, husband’s education, incidence of twins, source of water, and wealth index as significant predictors for the number of children’s death in a family from the best fitted model. Identification of the risk factors of the number of children’s death is an important public health issue and should be carried out correctly for the much needed intervention. Keywords Number of child deaths; Predictors; NBR; ZINBR; HR