Citation

Boulieri A, Bennett JE, Blangiardo M. Biostatistics 2018; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, MRC- PHE Environment and Health, Imperial College London, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/biostatistics/kxy038

PMID

30252021

Abstract

Spatial monitoring of trends in health data plays an important part of public health surveillance. Most commonly, it is used to understand the etiology of a public health issue, to assess the impact of an intervention, or to provide detection of unusual behavior. In this article, we present a Bayesian mixture model for public health surveillance, which is able to provide estimates of the disease risk in space and time, and also to detect areas with unusual behavior. The model is designed to deal with a range of spatial and temporal patterns in the data, and with time series of different lengths. We carry out a simulation study to assess the performance of the model under different scenarios, and we compare it against a recently proposed Bayesian model for short time series. Finally, the proposed model is used for surveillance of road traffic accidents data in England over the years 2005-2015.

Language: en