A Bayesian approach to combining multiple information sources: Estimating and forecasting childhood obesity in Thailand.

We estimate and forecast childhood obesity by age, sex, region, and urban-rural residence in Thailand, using a Bayesian approach to combining multiple source of information. Our main sources of information are survey data and administrative data, but we also make use of informative prior distributions based on international estimates of obesity trends and on expectations about smoothness. Although the final model is complex, the difficulty of building and understanding the model is reduced by the fact that it is composed of many smaller submodels.