Verbal autopsy methods with multiple causes of death
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Publication:900487
DOI10.1214/07-STS247zbMATH Open1327.62506arXiv0808.0645MaRDI QIDQ900487FDOQ900487
Publication date: 22 December 2015
Published in: Statistical Science (Search for Journal in Brave)
Abstract: Verbal autopsy procedures are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality in areas without medical death certification. Data on symptoms reported by caregivers along with the cause of death are collected from a medical facility, and the cause-of-death distribution is estimated in the population where only symptom data are available. Current approaches analyze only one cause at a time, involve assumptions judged difficult or impossible to satisfy, and require expensive, time-consuming, or unreliable physician reviews, expert algorithms, or parametric statistical models. By generalizing current approaches to analyze multiple causes, we show how most of the difficult assumptions underlying existing methods can be dropped. These generalizations also make physician review, expert algorithms and parametric statistical assumptions unnecessary. With theoretical results, and empirical analyses in data from China and Tanzania, we illustrate the accuracy of this approach. While no method of analyzing verbal autopsy data, including the more computationally intensive approach offered here, can give accurate estimates in all circumstances, the procedure offered is conceptually simpler, less expensive, more general, as or more replicable, and easier to use in practice than existing approaches. We also show how our focus on estimating aggregate proportions, which are the quantities of primary interest in verbal autopsy studies, may also greatly reduce the assumptions necessary for, and thus improve the performance of, many individual classifiers in this and other areas. As a companion to this paper, we also offer easy-to-use software that implements the methods discussed herein.
Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.0645
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sensitivityclassificationspecificitysurvey researchcause of deathcause-specific mortalityverbal autopsy
Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Medical applications (general) (92C50)
Cites Work
Cited In (5)
- Generalized Bayes Quantification Learning under Dataset Shift
- Binary quantification and dataset shift: an experimental investigation
- Probabilistic cause-of-disease assignment using case-control diagnostic tests: a latent variable regression approach
- Using Bayesian latent Gaussian graphical models to infer symptom associations in verbal autopsies
- Bayesian factor models for probabilistic cause of death assessment with verbal autopsies
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