Abstract:
Comprehensive, comparable, and timely estimates of age-specific mortality are essential for evaluating, understanding, and addressing trends in population health. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of timely all-cause mortality estimates for being able to respond to changing trends in health outcomes, showing a strong need for analysis tools that can produce all-cause mortality estimates more rapidly with more readily available all-age vital registration data. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) is an ongoing research effort that quantifies human health by estimating a range of epidemiological quantities of interest across time, age, sex, location, cause, and risk. This seminar will cover the methodology used to estimate all-cause mortality for the GBD. Specifically, it will explain the novel statistical model developed as part of the latest release (GBD 2023). This model accounts for complex correlation structures in demographic data across age and time, and flexibly allows the incorporation of new data sources not previously used in GBD analyses
Austin Schumacher, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He leads the Population, Fertility, and Mortality research team, an outstanding group of researchers and staff that develops methodology and produces estimates for the demographic components of the Global Burden of Disease study. His own research interests focus on developing statistical methods and modeling frameworks to improve estimation of demographic and health indicators on both local and global scales, and subsequently utilizing this research to increase understanding and ultimately improve health and wellbeing. He specializes in Bayesian methods, small area estimation, and general techniques for biostatistics and data science.
