Abstract:
Abstract
Introduction: Maternal health issues associated with pregnancy and delivery continue to be a major global concern, as well as the primary cause of morbidity and mortality among women of reproductive age. The low utilization of family planning during the postpartum period has contributed to 80 million unplanned pregnancies worldwide each year. Postpartum contraceptive use is a vital strategy to reduce these risks and improve health outcomes for women. Even if the postpartum period being critical for preventing unintended pregnancies, modern contraceptive use remains low in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Objective: This study aimed to predict postpartum contraceptive utilization and identifying its determinants among reproductive age women in selected sub-Saharan Africa countries, using a machine learning algorithm: 2024 G.C.
Method: This study was used data from a recent demographic health survey of selected sub-Saharan African countries. A weighted sample of 62,030 reproductive-age women included in the study. The data were cleaned by SPSS version 27. Python 3.12 were used for machine learning analysis. Furthermore, seven supervised machine learning algorisms were employed to predict and identify the most important predictors of postpartum contraceptive utilization.
Result: Extreme Gradient Boosting achieved an accuracy of 86% and area under the curve of 93%. The SHAP analysis showed that being literate, institutional delivery, health facility visits, secondary and higher education, antenatal care, maternal literacy and media exposure, increases the likelihood of postpartum contraceptive use. Association rule finding show that access to healthcare service, literacy, socioeconomic status, and media exposure play a significant role in contraceptive use during the postpartum period.
Conclusion and Recommendation: The findings suggest that extreme gradient boosting classifier have greater potential for predicting postpartum contraception use and identifying its determinates. To increase postpartum contraceptive usage, the study suggests enhancing access to maternal health services such as, antenatal care and institutional delivery, as well as boosting maternal literacy and media exposure. Furthermore, cooperating with governmental and non-governmental organization to promote family planning programs and policies, are critical steps in enhancing postpartum contraceptive use.
