Comparing hazard models for the growth failure of children in Iran

One of the statistical methods deployed in medical sciences to investigate time to event data is the survival analysis. This study, comparing efficiency of some parametric and semiparametric survival models, aims at investigating the effect of demographic and socio-economic factors on the growth failure of children below 2 years of age in Iran. The survival models including exponential, Weibull, log-logistic and log-normal models were compared to proportional hazards and extended Cox models by Akaike Information Criterion and variability of the estimated parameters. Based on the results, the log-normal model is recommended for analyzing the growth failure data of children in Iran. Furthermore, it is suggested that female children, children born to illiterate mothers and children born in larger households receive more attention in terms of growth failure.