Garbage collection

Public health

Pathology

Sociology

Metric (unit)

Disease

Mathematics

Statistics

Demography

Engineering

Nursing

Programming language

Operations management

Data quality

Computer science

Cause of death

Medicine

Garbage

Environmental health

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Accurate, comprehensive, cause-specific mortality estimates are crucial for informing public health decision making worldwide. Incorrectly or vaguely assigned deaths, defined as garbage-coded deaths, mask the true cause distribution. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study has developed methods to create comparable, timely, cause-specific mortality estimates; an impactful data processing method is the reallocation of garbage-coded deaths to a plausible underlying cause of death. We identify the pattern of garbage-coded deaths in the world and present the methods used to determine their redistribution to generate more plausible cause of death assignments.

Public health utility of cause of death data: applying empirical algorithms to improve data quality