Modelling Mother-To-Child HIV Transmission Rate in Nigeria Using an Exponentiated Exponential Inverse Exponential Distribution

Abstract

The act of adding extra parameters into existing distributions for increasing their flexibility or performance is a giant stride in the area of statistical theory and applications. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a disease caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that leads to a progressive deterioration of the immune system. Mother-to-child transmission of HIV is a problem in Nigeria where its rate has been on an increase over the past few years. The Exponentiation family is one of the most efficient methods proposed and studied for introducing skewness and flexibility into continuous probability distributions with a single shape parameter. In this paper, the method of exponentiation has been used to add flexibility to the exponential inverse exponential distribution which results to a new continuous model known as “Exponentiated Exponential Inverse Exponential distribution”. The properties, application and estimation of parameters of the new distribution using the method of maximum likelihood estimation are presented and discussed in this paper. The new model has been applied to a dataset on the rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and the result is being compared among the fitted distributions using some information criteria.