Dr Monica Alexander is an Assistant Professor in Statistical Sciences and Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods to help measure demographic and health outcomes. She received a PhD in Demography and Masters in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that she received a Masters of Social Research from the ANU, so she was back on familiar ground to present the School of Demography seminar on Friday 30 June. A dozen or so attended online, with more at the gathering in person.
Monica loves a good statistical model, and so do I. She described a study of racial disparities in infant mortality outcomes, carefully modelling competing effects on the age of infant death in the first year. But relationships evolve over time and so should models, with Monica presenting models evolving from a line to piecewise linear to including covariates in order to avoid Simpson’s paradox coming in to bite!
Monica illustrated her talk with very rich US data sets around national vital statistics, which enabled her to also investigate how characteristics of racial differences in infant outcomes helped to improve demographic models. An intriguing non-linear pattern in probability of infant death from the pre-term to the post-term period (20 weeks’ gestation to 40 weeks’ post-birth) arose from this second set of modelling.
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