Modeling of Birth Seasonality in Canada and the Provinces

Seasonality of birth has been observed in virtually all historical and contemporary populations. Exogenous type explanations for birth seasonality have been classified under two main headings: sociocultural and environmental. The role of social class, marriage, holidays, and agricultural cycles have been implicated as sociocultural determinants of the seasonality phenomenon. Within the environmental class of hypotheses, temperature and photoperiod have received much attention in the biometeorological literature. Seasonal oscillations in birth rates are ubiquitous in human populations. In particular, these oscillations might play an important role in infectious disease dynamics because they induce seasonal variation in the number of susceptible individuals that enter populations, and the seasonality of birth rate is incorporated into the standard, deterministic epidemic models and identify parameter regions in which birth seasonality can be expected to have observable epidemiological effects. Though the seasonality of birth has been studied by the large number of scholars, the role of different determinants has not been clarified, since this cannot easily be dealt with by the ordinary statistical methods. Within the presented project we have used Fourier analysis for estimating the contribution of different determinants into the seasonality of birth. Applying the Fourier analysis it has been determined the dominating frequencies in the seasonal birth oscillations. Using the results of the Fourier analysis we have developed a model describing the temporal dynamics of the birth seasonality in Canada.