Forecasting Neonatal Mortality in Portugal

Abstract

In order to achieve a more efficient allocation of healthcare resources in the near future, it is crucial to understand the patterns and causes of excess mortality and hospitalizations. Neonatal mortality still poses a significant challenge, particularly in developed nations where the mortality rates are already low and healthcare resources are generally available to most of the population. Furthermore, the low mortality rates mean that the data available for modeling are often very limited, restricting the modeling methods that can be used. It is also important that the chosen methods allow for explainable, non-black-box models that can be interpreted by healthcare professionals. Considering these challenges, the work hereby presented thoroughly analyzed the time series of the neonatal mortality rates in Portugal between 2014 and 2019 in terms of trend and seasonal patterns. The applicability and performance of different data-based methods were also analyzed. Furthermore, the mortality rates were studied in terms of their relation to environmental variables, such as temperature and air pollution indicators, with the goal of establishing causal relations between such variables and excess mortality. The preliminary results show that ARMA, neural and fuzzzy models are able to forecast the studied mortality rates with good performance. In particular, neural models have the best predictive performance, while fuzzy models are well suited to obtain interpretable models with acceptable performance.

Keywords

• neonatal mortality
• time series forecasting
• ARMA
• neural models
• fuzzy models