Evaluation and Estimation of the Provincial Infant Mortality Rate in China's Sixth Census

To assess the data quality and estimate the provincial infant mortality rate (1q0) from China's sixth census.

A log-quadratic model is applied to under-fifteen data. We analyze and compare the average relative errors (AREs) for 1q0 between the estimated and reported values using the leave-one-out cross-validation method.

For the sixth census, the AREs are more than 100% for almost all provinces. The estimated average 1q0 level for 31 provinces is 12.3‰ for males and 10.7‰ for females.

The data for the provincial 1q0 from China's sixth census have a serious data quality problem. The actual levels of 1q0 for each province are significantly higher than the reported values.