The impact of urbanization and population density on childhood Plasmodium falciparum parasite prevalence rates in Africa

Table 1 Summary of the average contributions of predictor variables using a boosted regression trees (Model VII) developed with cross-validation over 25 bootstraps

Predictor	Relative contribution (%)
Child specific predictors
Age in months	5.01 (SD 0.25)
Gender	0.38 (SD 0.05)
Malaria testing method	1.29 (SD 0.24)
Slept under a net	0.47 (SD 0.08)
Slept under ITN	0.59 (SD 0.09)
Fever in last 2 weeks	1.37 (SD 0.1)
Fever treatment	1.82 (SD 0.17)
Treatment with anti-malarial	0.43 (SD 0.06)
Mothers age in years	6.33 (SD 0.23)
Mothers education level	1.38 (SD 0.15)
Household level predictors
HH with IRS	1.47 (SD 0.15)
Per capita net ownership	0.64 (SD 0.11)
Wealth index	3.43 (SD 0.31)
Cluster level predictors
Population density	9.55 (SD 0.46)
CSO urban	1.5 (SD 0.2)
Enhanced vegetation index (EVI)	4.18 (SD 0.2)
Annual mean temperature	16.68 (SD 0.64)
Temperature suitability index (TSI)	5.15 (SD 0.43)
Annual mean precipitation	14.19 (SD 0.37)
Malaria seasonality (>60%)	0.15 (SD 0.03)

Between-country effects controlled for in the model accounts for 24% not represented in the table. The effect of country-specific factors not collected in DHS/MICS datasets not accounted for in the BRT models. Results shown for Model VII that includes population density, urbanization and a common set of confounding variables