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Supplementary materials for "Bayesian factor models for probabilistic cause of death assessment with verbal autopsies": p. 1-4

The distribution of deaths by cause provides crucial information for public health planning, response, and evaluation. About 60% of deaths globally are not registered or given a cause, limiting our ability to understand disease epidemiology. Verbal autopsy (VA) surveys are increasingly used in such settings to collect information on the signs, symptoms, and medical history of people who have recently died. This article develops a novel Bayesian method for estimation of population distributions of deaths by cause using verbal autopsy data. The proposed approach is based on a multivariate probit model where associations among items in questionnaires are flexibly induced by latent factors. Using the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium labeled data that include both VA and medically certified causes of death, we assess performance of the proposed method. Further, we estimate important questionnaire items that are highly associated with causes of death. This framework provides insights that will simplify future data collection.

In many applications, it is of interest to study trends over time in relationships among categorical variables, such as age group, ethnicity, religious affiliation, political party and preference for particular policies. At each time point, a sample of individuals provide responses to a set of questions, with different individuals sampled at each time. In such settings, there tends to be abundant missing data and the variables being measured may change over time. At each time point, one obtains a large sparse contingency table, with the number of cells often much larger than the number of individuals being surveyed. To borrow information across time in modeling large sparse contingency tables, we propose a Bayesian autoregressive tensor factorization approach. The proposed model relies on a probabilistic Parafac factorization of the joint pmf characterizing the categorical data distribution at each time point, with autocorrelation included across times. Efficient computational methods are developed relying on MCMC. The methods are evaluated through simulation examples and applied to social survey data.