Vital Statistics Data Analysis in New York City



Group Member

Yi Xiao(yx2510)

Xue Yang(xy2397)

Kangkang Zhang(kz2334)

Yue Zhao(yz3297)


Motivation

Vital statistics including birth and mortality data is of critical importance in assesssing community health status. Birth rate, leading cause of death and mortality rate often serve as cornerstone in formulating public health policies.

Motality data, for example, offers a snapshot of current health problems and knowing the causes of death, especially the avoidable and treatable ones, helps us to establish intervention for better outcomes. By investigating the trend of a specific cause of death over time, we can also identify consistent risk in a specific groups and evaluate the effect of a certain public health policy. Disparity in mortality rate, premature death and cause of death in different race and gender can indicate socioeconomic inequility.

Birth data, similarly, provide essential information from another prospective. Different maternal age and maternal nativity can be differently associated with offspring health outcome. Advanced maternal age, for instance, is linked with negative infant health as suggest by studies and infant health condition can also vary between US born and foreign born. Thus, understanding the pattern of distribution of those factors in different communities can indicate possible public health problems.


Data Sources

Our data is from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene .

Datasets that will be used in this project are, but not limited to, the birth micro SAS Datasets and death micro SAS Datasets from National Vital Statistics System (time period is from 2000 to 2014). American Community Survey can be refered to for poverty data.


Conclusions

In terms of cause of death, heart disease and malignant neoplasms were by far the top causes of death regardless of bourough of residency, gender, age and race. Difference among gender groups and year are small. One major change over time is that HIV has dropped out from the top ten leading cause of death. However, it kept remained in the top risk list for the Black and Hispanic. Difference among gender and age group, on the other hand, was relatively large. Chronic disease was the main risk for aged-people while HIV and homicide were only in the top cause of premature death.

We were intended to merge the birth dataset with the death dataset and explore the relationship between maternal/neonatal death rate and maternal characteristics. However, maternal and neonatal death dataset required permission and therefore split into two relatively individual parts. In the birth data analysis, we observed an sure rising trend in advanced maternal age. This could impact on the maternal and infant mortality as well as infant defect (one of our future work). Other variables, such as maternal nativity, maternal status also varied across different borough.

Future work

Other future work include stratifying each community districts in New York into according to porverty level and examining its associate with death and birth rate.

Repository