Chad Hazlett, IPUMS Global Health Research Awards Winner
IPUMS GLOBAL HEALTH RESEARCH AWARDS WINNERS:
Published Research:
Chad Hazlett, Antonio P. Ramos, and Stephen Smith
Better individual-level risk models can improve the targeting and life-saving potential of early-mortality interventions
In a piece with important policy implications, the authors demonstrate that public health efforts targeting the poorest households perform little better than random targeting in reducing infant mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Employing IPUMS DHS data from 22 countries and machine learning techniques, they show that using available pre-birth variables (such as the infant death of a sibling) can effectively identify the most at-risk 10 percent of infants and eliminate 15 to 30 percent of infant deaths, depending on the country.