Modeling diarrhea disease in children less than 5 years old: a GAM and GLM approach

Abstract

This paper presents the application of generalized additive model (GAM) and generalized linear model (GLM) as an exploratory tool for analyzing the factors that affect the occurrence of diarrhea of Bangladeshi child. The relation between the factors that are related with occurrence of diarrhea can be obtained by modeling parametric approach (GLM). But in practice the relation is not straight forward and we require elaborate explanations which incline semiparametric regression (GAM). We present a unified approach for analyzing factors affecting diarrhea via GLM and GAM. We applied Akaike's information criterion to select the best model for our data. Our study analyzes nonlinear resolution of covariate not available with traditional parametric models and the results provide some evidence on how to reduce occurrence of diarrhea by improving socio-economic and public health conditions.