Immunization crisis may develop due to economic crisis during COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis with 61, 149,391 confirmed cases and 370,478 deaths till 29May, 2020 [1]. This pandemic has shattered many economies with an estimated loss of $5.8 trillion to $8.8 trillion globally. This economic loss can result in reduction in funds to World Health Organization. Unfortunately, United States of America (USA) has announced termination of any further funding to WHO which can lead to another global health crisis[2]. As WHO is a voluntary funding based organization its main donor are America, China, Japan, Germany and United Kingdom. Among these USA is the main donor with a contribution of $115.8million alone followed by China $57.4 million, Japan $41million, Germany $29.1 million and UK $21.9 million [3].  America’s termination of funding can put WHO and child health programs in serious crisis. Among many programs run by WHO one of the most important program is immunization of children. Immunization coverage programs  save 2-3 million livesper year causing decline in measles related deaths, eradication of polio, surveillance of rotavirus, BCG and DTaP vaccination in children[4]. It is estimated that during MillenniumDevelopment Goal (MDG) there is overall decline in child related mortalities due to malaria, measles, diarrhea, AIDS and meningitis [5]. Remarkable results are achieved with measles are diarrhea immunization programs causing a decline in death rate by 73% and 80% respectively. According to a study with current success rate diarrhea related deaths can be virtually eliminated by 2030. Another successful program is “End Polio” program which eradicated polio from world except from Pakistan and Afghanistan [4][6]. This termination of funds to WHO can waste all previous efforts in developing countries. On the other hand despite of all efforts still 19.4 million children did not received prescribed dose of vaccines. Data analysis revealed among these  60% of children belong to 10 developing countries namelyAngola, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Viet Nam [4]. These countries mainly rely on foreign funding and Non-Government Organization (NGOs) for child health care programs.

Robust and Bootstrap Procedures in Regression Analysis and Outliers Detection Tests

It is evident from the comments by Bernoulli (1777) that the history of outliers is very old and traces back to some 200 years ago indicating that “discardin g discordant observations” was a common practice even 200 years ago. In the opinion of investigator, “Outliers” are the observations that deviate from the remaining observations or bulk of the data and require proper treatment as statistical anal yses are h ighl y influenced by the presence of such observation in all t ypes of data sets. Many attempts have been made to cope with such observations and to provide protection against outliers. Robust statistics and robust regression techniques have been developed b y researchers with the passage of time to handle outliers and to minimize the effect of outliers. Work is still continuing to modify the previousl y devel oped techniques or to introduce even more advanced and improved techniques. Our present study has thre e important dimensions. The first portion of this study deals with the comparison of several tests developed by researchers to identify one or more outliers in single sample case. In this study we also propose some univarite tests to be used for the detection of outliers in case of sampling from a heavy tailed symmetric distribution, that is, Cauchy distribution. We conduct detailed simulation studies to compute critical values for the tests for various sample sizes available in the literature and also for the proposed tests while sampling is from the Cauchy distribution. We also have computed simulated powers based on 10000 simulations to compare iithese tests for various sample sizes up to 30 in the presence of different number of outliers varying from 1 to 5. We consider three (3) examples where artificial data sets were generated from Cauchy distribution containing 1, 2 and 3 outliers to investigate the performance of all of the tests under consideration. The second part of m y PhD thesis is mainl y concerne d with robust regression. Several researchers have proposed M - estimators and redescending M- estimators to handle outliers by assigning smaller weights to outliers in order to minimize their effect. We propose a new and efficient redescending M - estimator, called “Alamgir Redescending M- Estimator (ALARM)”. We investigate its asymptotic efficiency for various sample sizes and different number of predictors. We determine the optimum value for the tuning constant parameter of our proposed estimator. We condu cted simulation studies to evaluate and compare its performance with several other redescending M - estimators available in the literature. Our proposed estimator performs better than rest of the estimators in majorit y of simulated scenarios and outperforms the remaining estimators in some cases, particularl y, in the prese nce of higher percentages of ou tliers in the data. We also present some examples based on real data sets to illustrate the performance of our proposed estimator. The proposed estimator does well in fitting the real data sets containing different percentages of outliers and detected as many outliers as any other estimator did. Our proposed estimator provides protection against outliers and proves to be very efficient estimator. iiiIn the last pa rt of my PhD thesis, we propose a new bootstrap procedure, called “ Split Sample Bootstrap (SSB)” which is a very robust alternative to other classical or recentl y developed bootstrap procedure providing maximum protection against outliers. The proposed pro cedure has high breakdown point. We conduct ed some simulation studies to examine the performance of SSB and to compare it with two other bootstrap procedures under various simulation scenarios. The performance of the proposed procedure and the two other procedures is judged by computing the bootstrap estimate of the bias, bootstrap standard error (SE) and length of the bootstrap confidence interval. We observe very promising results for our proposed procedure with respect to bias, SE and length. Our propose d bootstrap procedure result s in numerical stabilit y and high efficiency of the estimates as compared to other two bootstrap procedures. The proposed procedure result in shortest confidence intervals for the parameter estimates for all sample sizes and for different number of predictor variables in the regression model at all level of contaminations, particularl y, in the presence of higher percentage of outliers as compared to the other two bootstrap procedures under consideration in the study. We consider two real data examples and the results similar to simulation results have been found in both examples. The Computer programing for simulation studies was done in R software (version 2.14.1 ).