A Hurdle Negative Binomial Regression Model for Non-Marital Fertility in Namibia

The rise of non-marital fertility, which seems to defy the Bongaarts model by decoupling marriage from fertility, has become a subject of interest in both the developed and developing world. Consequences of non-marital fertility are mostly negative particularly in developing countries. In Namibia, although premarital childbearing has been reported to be high and increasing, no studies have explicitly analyzed factors influencing non-marital fertility. This paper uses data from the 2006/7 Namibia DHS to establish the determinants of non-marital fertility among women by applying a two-part model, with one part to describe the presence of non-marital birth and the other part to explain its intensity （number of children born）. Using the number of children ever born as an outcome, we explored various count data models. Based on the Voung statistics model comparison, we settled for the Hurdle logit Negative Binomial regression to model the number of non-marital births. Non-marital fertility in Namibia is associated with the age, with young women likely to have lower fertility compared to older women. Women with secondary or higher education had lower fertility compared those with no formal education. Findings also show that rural women higher fertility propensity compared to their urban counterparts even though there was no significant difference in fertility intensity. With regard to socio-economic status, fertility intensity decreased as the women got richer. Intervention efforts should focus on promoting education among girls and women especially in rural areas to improve their socio-economic status, reduce teenage pregnancy and non-marital fertility.

Short Term Wind Speed Prediction Using Multiple Kernel Pseudo Inverse Neural Network

An accurate short-term wind speed prediction algorithm based on the efficient kernel ridge pseudo inverse neural network （KRPINN） variants is proposed in this paper. The use of nonlinear kernel functions in pseudo inverse neural networks eliminates the trial and error approach of choosing the number of hidden layer neurons and their activation functions. The robustness of the proposed method has been validated in comparison with other models such as pseudo inverse radial basis function （PIRBF） and Legendre tanh activation function based neural network, i.e., PILNNT, whose input weights to the hidden layer weights are optimized using an adaptive firefly algorithm, i.e., FFA. However, since the individual kernel functions based KRPINN may not be able to produce accurate forecasts under chaotically varying wind speed conditions, a linear combination of individual kernel functions is used to build the multi kernel ridge pseudo inverse neural network （MK-RPINN） for providing improved forecasting accuracy, generalization, and stability of the wind speed prediction model. Several case studies have been presented to validate the accuracy of the short-term wind speed prediction models using the real world wind speed data from a wind farm in the Wyoming State of USA over time horizons varying from 10 minutes to 5 hours.