Temesgen, Shibru(PhD)Argaw, Abebe2018-06-222023-11-092018-06-222023-11-092016-06http://10.90.10.223:4000/handle/123456789/2907Analysis of clustering effect in modeling the determinants of time-to-under-five mortality in Ethiopia. Abebe Argaw Addis Ababa University, 2016 Under-five mortality is one of the critical indicator of development of a country. It tells of children’s access to basic health interventions such as vaccinations, medical treatment and inadequate nutrition (WHO, 2013). According to preliminary estimates, the global U5MR has declined by more than half, dropping from 90 to 43 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1990 and 2015. But, at today’s rate of progress, it will take about 10 more years to reach the global target (UNICEF, 2015). The main objective of this study is to identify the determinants of time to under-five mortality in Ethiopia. The data for the study were taken from the 2014 Ethiopian Mini Demographic and Health Survey of women in the age group15-49 years. Mothers’ educational level, mothers’ age at first birth, place of residence, household size, sex of child born, preceding birth interval, economic status of family, place of delivery, marital status of family, and source of drinking water were identified as determinant factors that affect the time to under-five mortality from the socio-economic and demographic variables, and environmental factors. Regions of study were used as clusters which was taken care of the frailty term at regional level and shared frailty models were explored. Comparison of the model was done by using AIC, and Weibull-Gamma shared frailty model was selected for time-to-under-five mortality in Ethiopia. Based on the result of selected model, except marital status of family and age of mothers’ at first birth, all the identified predictor variables had significant effect on time to under-five mortality. Great attention should be given to these predictor variables while planning to increase child survival time. Key words: Heterogeneity, Frailty, Laplace transformations, penalized partial likelihoodenHeterogeneityFrailtyLaplace transformationspenalized partial likelihoodThesis