Abstract:
Low birth weight of babies has been associated with increased mortality rate at infancy.
What’s more, babies with low birthweight have higher death rates at later childhood and
adolescence. They also suffer from many other problems. For these reasons, it is very important
for us to know which factors are responsible for causing low birthweight of babies. Although a
good number of researches are available in the literature there are lots of unresolved issues and
there is a need for further studies on this subject to find better estimates of parameters on the
nature and causes of low birth weight of babies. In our research, the main objective is to find the
key factors that may be responsible for low birth weight of babies. We find two very interesting
data sets, one of them is longitudinal in nature, where we have both numerical and categorical
values of birthweight of babies. It gives us a wonderful opportunity to employ both linear and
logistic regression models on these data. We also employed recent and sophsicated diagnostics
for the validity of our results that include tests for normality, detection of influential
observations, high leverage points and outliers, test for multicollinearity and discrimination. This
study reveals that variables such as weight of mothers at last menstrual period, race, smoking
habit during pregnancy, history of hypertension and presence of uterine irritability have
significant impacts on the low birthweight of babies.
