Factors Causing Stunting Among Under-Five Children in Bangladesh

Abstract

Malnutrition is one of the major problems in developing countries including Bangladesh. Stunting is a chronic malnutrition, which indicates low height for age and interrupt the growth. The purpose of this research is to find out the factors associated with the malnutrition status and test the accuracy of the algorithms used to identify the factors. Data from Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey (BDHS), 2014, is used. Factors like demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental have differential influence on stunting. Based on analysis, about 36% of under-five children were suffering from stunting. Decision tree algorithm was applied to find the associated factors with stunting. It is found that mothers’ education, birth order number, and economic status were associated with stunting. Support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) are also applied with the stunting dataset to test the accuracy. The accuracy of decision tree is 74%, SVM is 76%, and ANN is 73%.