An alternative technique to ordinal logistic regression model under failed parallelism assumption

Abstract

Maternal health status is often measured in medical studies on an ordinal scale but data of this type arc generally reduced for analysis to a single dichotomy. Several statistical models have been developed to make full use of information in ordinal response data, but have not been much used in analyzing pregnancy outcomes. The authors discussed two of these statistical models the ordinal logistic regression model and the multinomial logistic regression model. Logistic regression models are used to analyze the dependent variable with multiple outcomes which can either be ranked or not. In this study, we described two logistic regression models for analyzing the categorical response variable. The first model uses the proportion-! odds model while the second uses the multinomial logistic regression model. The fits of these models using data on delivery from a Nigerian State hospital record/database were illustrated and compared to study the pregnancy outcomes. Analyses based on these models were carried out using STATA statistical package. The Multinomial logistic regression was found to be an important alternative to the ordinal regression technique when proportional odds assumption failed. The weight of the baby and the mother's history of disease (treated or not treated) were found to be important in determining the pregnancy outcome.