Assessment of Factors Affecting Infant Mortality Using Categorical Principal Component Analysis

This study attempts to evaluate principal components concomitant to infant mortality. IMR is affected by several factors belonging to maternal characteristics, child characteristics, utilization of health services and socioeconomic status of the people. Each of these factors includes a large number of variables. Categorical Principal Component Analysis (CATPCA) method is applied as a data reduction tool to reduce dimensionality in data. Data for this work have been taken from NFHS III. The analysis produced a three-dimensional solution, which explains 50.47% of the variance with reliability of 89.1% (cronbach’s α 0.891). Total 26.17% variance is explained in dimension one, 12.49% variance in dimension two and 11.81% in third dimension. Maternal factors explain total 26.83% variance and child factors explain total 18.58% variance. Out of ten samples of size n/2 from the same data set, nine samples give similar results.