Diversity in substance use behaviour among street children of Delhi under Bayesian paradigm
- PDF / 575,915 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595 x 791 pts Page_size
- 36 Downloads / 169 Views
(2020) 20:291
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Diversity in substance use behaviour among street children of Delhi under Bayesian paradigm Vivek Verma1 , Ashwani Kumar Mishra2* , Anju Dhawan2 and Dilip C. Nath3
Abstract Background: Shannon’s index is one of the measures of biodiversity, which is intended to quantify both richness and evenness of the species/individuals in the ecosystem or community. However, application of Shannon’s index in the field of substance use among the street children has not been done till date. Methods: This paper is concerned with methods of estimating Shannon’s diversity index (SDI), which can be used to capture the variation in the population due to certain characteristics. Under the consideration that the probability of abundance, based on certain characteristics in the population, is a random phenomenon, we derive a Bayesian estimate in connection with Shannon’s information measure and their properties (mean and variance), by using a probability matching prior, through simulation and compared it with those of the classical estimates of Shannon. The theoretical framework has been applied to the primary survey data of substance use among the street children in Delhi, collected during 2015. The measure of diversity was estimated across different age profiles and districts. Results: The results unrevealing the diversity estimate for street children corresponding to each region of Delhi, under both the classical and Bayesian paradigms. Although the estimates were close to one another, a striking difference was noted in the age profile of children. Conclusions: The Bayesian methodology provided evidence for a greater likelihood of finding substance-using street children, belonging to the lower age group (7-10, maximum Bayesian entropy-3.73), followed by the middle (11-14) and upper age group (15-18). Moreover, the estimated variance under the Bayesian paradigm was lesser than that of the classical estimate. There is ample scope for further refinement in these estimates, by considering more covariates that may have a possible role in initiating substance use among street children in developing countries like India. Keywords: Response driven sampling, Street children, Shannon diversity index, Prior distribution, Posterior distribution
Background In ecology, a diversity index is a parameter of interest intended to measure biodiversity within an ecosystem [1]. The widely used diversity indices are Shannon’s index and Simpson’s index. They can be used to assess the diversity of any population in which each member belongs to a *Correspondence: [email protected] National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, India Full list of author information is available at the end of the article 2
unique species. Shannon’s diversity index (SDI) has been derived from the information theory, originally in the context of information in telephone systems. The SDI measures enables in ascertaining the membership of species chosen randomly to a par
Data Loading...
