Obtain the Horvitz-Thompson direct estimates and standard errors using delta method for multiple surveys.

Usage

getDirectList(
  births,
  years,
  regionVar = "region",
  timeVar = "time",
  clusterVar = "~v001+v002",
  ageVar = "age",
  weightsVar = "v005",
  Ntrials = NULL,
  geo.recode = NULL,
  national.only = FALSE
)

Arguments

births: A list of child-month data from multiple surveys from getBirths. The name of the list is used as the identifier in the output.
years: String vector of the year intervals used
regionVar: Variable name for region, typically 'v024', for older surveys might be 'v101'
timeVar: Variable name for the time period indicator in the input births data.
clusterVar: Variable name for the IDs in the second-stage cluster sampling, typically '~v001 + v002', i.e., the cluster number and household number. When no cluster sampling design exists, this variable usually is the household ID.
ageVar: Variable name for age group. This variable need to be in the form of "a-b" where a and b are both ages in months. For example, "1-11" means age between 1 and 11 months, including both end points. An exception is age less than one month can be represented by "0" or "0-0".
weightsVar: Variable name for sampling weights, typically 'v005'
Ntrials: Variable for the total number of person-months if the input data (births) is in the compact form.
geo.recode: The recode matrix to be used if region name is not consistent across different surveys. See ChangeRegion.
national.only: Logical indicator to obtain only the national estimates

Value

This is the extension to the getDirect function that returns estimates from multiple surveys. Additional columns in the output (survey and surveyYears) specify the estimates from different surveys.

References

Li, Z., Hsiao, Y., Godwin, J., Martin, B. D., Wakefield, J., Clark, S. J., & with support from the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation and its technical advisory group. (2019). Changes in the spatial distribution of the under-five mortality rate: Small-area analysis of 122 DHS surveys in 262 subregions of 35 countries in Africa. PloS one, 14(1), e0210645.

Mercer, L. D., Wakefield, J., Pantazis, A., Lutambi, A. M., Masanja, H., & Clark, S. (2015). Space-time smoothing of complex survey data: small area estimation for child mortality. The annals of applied statistics, 9(4), 1889.

Author

Zehang Richard Li, Bryan Martin, Laina Mercer

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
data(DemoData)
years <- c("85-89", "90-94", "95-99", "00-04", "05-09", "10-14")
mean <- getDirectList(births = DemoData, years = years, 
regionVar = "region", timeVar = "time", clusterVar = "~clustid+id", 
ageVar = "age", weightsVar = "weights", geo.recode = NULL)
} # }