Related papers: Using prior information to identify boundaries in …
Conditional autoregressive (CAR) models are commonly used to capture spatial correlation in areal unit data, and are typically specified as a prior distribution for a set of random effects, as part of a hierarchical Bayesian model. The…
Disease mapping attempts to explain observed health event counts across areal units, typically using Markov random field models. These models rely on spatial priors to account for variation in raw relative risk or rate estimates. Spatial…
In disease mapping, the aim is to estimate the spatial pattern in disease risk over an extended geographical region, so that areas with elevated risks can be identified. A Bayesian hierarchical approach is typically used to produce such…
To date, we have seen the emergence of a large literature on multivariate disease mapping. That is, incidence of (or mortality from) multiple diseases is recorded at the scale of areal units where incidence (mortality) across the diseases…
Statistical models used to estimate the spatio-temporal pattern in disease risk from areal unit data represent the risk surface for each time period with known covariates and a set of spatially smooth random effects. The latter act as a…
The objective of disease mapping is to model data aggregated at the areal level. In some contexts, however, (e.g. residential histories, general practitioner catchment areas) when data is arising from a variety of sources, not necessarily…
Spatial correlation in areal unit count data is typically modelled by a set of random effects that are assigned a conditional autoregressive (CAR) prior distribution. The spatial correlation structure implied by this model depends on a…
Disease mapping is the field of spatial epidemiology interested in estimating the spatial pattern in disease risk across $n$ areal units. One aim is to identify units exhibiting elevated disease risks, so that public health interventions…
Epidemiologists commonly use regional aggregates of health outcomes to map mortality or incidence rates and identify geographic disparities. However, to detect health disparities across regions, it is necessary to identify "difference…
Conditional auto-regressive (CAR) distributions are widely used to induce spatial dependence in the geographic analysis of areal data. These distributions establish multivariate dependence networks by defining conditional relationships…
Estimation of the long-term health effects of air pollution is a challenging task, especially when modelling small-area disease incidence data in an ecological study design. The challenge comes from the unobserved underlying spatial…
Spatio-temporal disease mapping models are commonly used to estimate the relative risk of a disease over time and across areas. For each area and time point, the disease count is modelled with a Poisson distribution whose mean is the…
Epidemiological investigations of regionally aggregated spatial data often involve detecting spatial health disparities among neighboring regions on a map of disease mortality or incidence rates. Analyzing such data introduces spatial…
Health surveys allow exploring health indicators that are of great value from a public health point of view and that cannot normally be studied from regular health registries. These indicators are usually coded as ordinal variables and may…
Regional aggregates of health outcomes over delineated administrative units (e.g., states, counties, zip codes), or areal units, are widely used by epidemiologists to map mortality or incidence rates and capture geographic variation. To…
In epidemiological disease mapping one aims to estimate the spatio-temporal pattern in disease risk and identify high-risk clusters, allowing health interventions to be appropriately targeted. Bayesian spatio-temporal models are used to…
Prevalence mapping in low resource settings is an increasingly important endeavor to guide policy making and to spatially and temporally characterize the burden of disease. We will focus our discussion on consideration of the complex design…
In the presence of unmeasured spatial confounding, spatial models may actually increase (rather than decrease) bias, leading to uncertainty as to how they should be applied in practice. We evaluated spatial modeling approaches through…
Spatial connectivity is an important consideration when modelling infectious disease data across a geographical region. Connectivity can arise for many reasons, including shared characteristics between regions, and human or vector movement.…
Diabetes prevalence is on the rise in the UK, and for public health strategy, estimation of relative disease risk and subsequent mapping is important. We consider an application to London data on diabetes prevalence and mortality. In order…