ABSTRACT
Haines, Munoz and van Gelderen (1989) have described the fitting of Gaussian ARIMA models to various discrete-valued time series related to births occurring during a 16-year period at Edendale Hospital in Natal∗, South Africa. The data include monthly totals of mothers delivered and deliveries by various methods at the Obstetrics Unit of that hospital in the period from February 1970 to January 1986 inclusive. Although 16 years of data were available, Haines et al. considered only the final eight years’ observations when modelling any series other than the total deliveries. This was because, for some of the series they modelled, the model structure was found not to be stable over the full 16-year period. In this analysis we have in general modelled only the last eight years’ observations.
