Using mobile device data to generate population estimates of fertility parameters

Pregnancy loss is a primary limit on human reproduction and a key driver of population dynamics. It is also very difficult to study. 85% of pregnancy loss happens prior to clinical interaction. We use information from over a million users of a fertility tracking application to construct estimates of pregnancy loss in the United States. In this talk, we discuss several challenges of using digital trace data–censoring, missing data, and measurement error–and the prediction tasks we currently use to navigate them.