ABSTRACT

The aim of studying mortality is to enable inferences to be drawn about the death occurring within a specific population during a specific period of time. The problems of the study includes causes of infant mortality, possible solutions to the problem and to know whether the trend is on increase while the main objective is determine the trend of infant mortality among the total death that occurred at Federal Medical Centre Umuahia, Ahia State. The method of analysis used was Box and Jenkins Iterative Method. It employed the use of Autocorrelation Functions (ACF) and Partial Autocorrelation Function (PACF). This will lead to identification of patterns. The time plot of the original data was made in order to determine whether the series has any statistical properties, that is trend and this will lead to the use of analysis of the original data. The original series was analyzed and the least square was estimated using Mini tab 16, a trend was found. Having checked the patterns, the ACF and PACF was examined; the ACF of the series has three cut off lying over 95% confidence interval without any spike, it does not decay exponentially rather a sine wave pattern while the PACF has a cut off at lag 1 and a spike lying over 95% confidence interval; it does not decay exponentially rather a sine wave pattern. Having seen that the data is non-stationary, it was differenced to achieve stationarity. Thereafter, the first difference was taken and was found that the ACF of the non-seasonal series has no cut off at the seasonal lag but a significant cut off was observed at lag 1, suggesting a moving average of order 1 also the PACF was examined and there was two cut off lying over 95% confidence interval and this suggesting an autoregressive of order 2. After examining the ACF and PACF an ARIMA (211) model was chosen. For model verification, the adequacy checking of the residual was employed. There is no cut off in the ACF and PACF of the residual which signified that appropriate model was used. From the forecast it was found that infant mortality in Abia State is still on increase.