Are Socio-Economic, Health Infrastructure, and Demographic Factors Associated with Infant Mortality in Russia?

Literatures have shown that factors associated with infant mortality worldwide include not only the diseases of infants, mother's health conditions, but also social economic, environment, education and other factors in the society. Although the infant mortality has been declining in the recent decades, it continues to be an international concern. In general, the factors associated with the infant death due to diseases or mother's health conditions are similar worldwide. However, the social economic and environmental relate factors differ among countries. This study focuses on the investigation of social economic and environmental related factors that are associated with the infant mortality rate in Russia. The sampling unit of the infant mortality rate and potential factors are collected at the ‘region' level of Russia. Over 100 variables are identified using various national statistics databases of Russia. The issue of data quality is discussed in detail. Various strategies are applied to clean the data. Eight different modeling techniques are applied to identify potentially important factors that may have high association with the infant mortality rate in Russia.