Fig 1.
2000 child mortality values for countries (under-5 mortality per 1,000 live births).
Fig 2.
2015 child mortality values for countries (under-5 mortality per 1,000 live births).
Fig 3.
(a) Bayes factor values for dynamical system models with different number of terms. The four term model M4 is the best fit model. In this paper we use the 3 term model M3 which performs close to M4 for computational ease. (b) Model fitting error variance as a function of C. The blue dots shows the residual error standard deviation based on the model fitting and the black curve shows a linear regression model of the standard deviation fit to the data.
Fig 4.
Percentage reduction from 1990 values of child mortality reduction for different countries in the world in 2015.
The MDG target is a 66.7% reduction by 2015 and the map shows that there are many countries which managed only between 20 − 60% reduction. Three countries—Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe have higher child mortality values in 2015 than they had in 1990.
Fig 5.
Performance of four countries based on model predictions.
The red dots show the actual values of child mortality for the different countries, the dashed line shows the MDG target. The solid black line is the mean predicted trajectory of the country based on our model and 10,000 different realisations of the noise process with corresponding errors corresponding to twice the standard deviation as obtained from the simulations. Angola and Brazil are performing within confidence intervals of our model predictions. Thus these two countries are performing as would be expected by our model but while Brazil has easily met its MDG target, Angola is far from reaching its MDG target. India and China are over-performing relative to our model. India has actually not reached its MDG target whereas Brazil and China have already exceeded their MDG targets (see Model section for details).
Table 1.
The first column is the three letter ISO code for the country, the second column is the 2015 values of child mortality, the third column is the MDG target and the fourth and fifth columns are the baseline and ambitious targets for 2015 based on our model.
A column value in bold indicates that the 2015 CM value is lower than the particular column value.
Fig 6.
Performance of countries in 2015 based on model predictions.
Red shaded countries “underperformed”—their actual child mortality level in 2015 was at least 2 standard deviations more than the model predicted average. Blue shaded countries “over-performed”—their child mortality in 2015 was at least 2 standard deviations less than the model predicted mean. White shaded countries had actual child mortality values within 2 standard deviations away from the model predicted mean. (Countries shaded grey did not have sufficient data for the simulation).
Fig 7.
Probability of reaching the MDG target for different countries based on our model starting from 2000 values.
Red indicates that a country had less than 20% chance of achieving the MDG target based on historical data. A few countries like Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and Egypt actually had a very good probability of reaching the MDG target and our models show that the MDG target was unambitious with respect to these countries.