Temporal Models for Demographic and Global Health Outcomes in Multiple Populations: Introducing a New Framework to Review and Standardise Documentation of Model Assumptions and Facilitate Model Comparison

Abstract

There is growing interest in producing estimates of demographic and global health indicators in populations with limited data. Statistical models are needed to combine data from multiple data sources into estimates and projections with uncertainty. Diverse modelling approaches have been applied to this problem, making comparisons between models difficult. We propose a model class, Temporal Models for Multiple Populations (TMMPs), to facilitate both documentation of model assumptions in a standardised way and comparison across models. The class makes a distinction between the process model, which describes latent trends in the indicator interest, and the data model, which describes the data generating process of the observed data. We provide a general notation for the process model that encompasses many popular temporal modelling techniques, and we show how existing models for a variety of indicators can be written using this notation. We end with a discussion of outstanding questions and future directions.