Adjustment of Korean Birth Weight Data

Abstract

Birth weight of a new born baby provides very important information in evaluating many clinical issues such as fetal growth restriction. This paper analyzes birth weight data of babies born in Korea from 2011 to 2013, and it shows that there is a biologically implausible distribution of birth weights in the data. This implies that some errors may be generated in the data collection process. In particular, this paper analyzes the relationship between gestational period and birth weight, and it is shown that the birth weight data mostly of gestational periods from 28 to 32 weeks have noticeable errors. Therefore, this paper employs the finite Gaussian mixture model to classify the collected data points into two classes: non-corrupted and corrupted. After the classification the paper removes data points that have been predicted to be corrupted. This adjustment scheme provides more natural and medically plausible percentile values of birth weights for all the gestational periods.