A scalable approach for short-term disease forecasting in high spatial resolution areal data.

Short-term disease forecasting at specific discrete spatial resolutions has become a high-impact decision-support tool in health planning. However, when the number of areas is very large obtaining predictions can be computationally intensive or even unfeasible using standard spatiotemporal models. The purpose of this paper is to provide a method for short-term predictions in high-dimensional areal data based on a newly proposed "divide-and-conquer" approach.

Big problems in spatio-temporal disease mapping: Methods and software.

Background And Objective: Fitting spatio-temporal models for areal data is crucial in many fields such as cancer epidemiology. However, when data sets are very large, many issues arise. The main objective of this paper is to propose a general procedure to analyze high-dimensional spatio-temporal areal data, with special emphasis on mortality/incidence relative risk estimation.

Dealing with risk discontinuities to estimate cancer mortality risks when the number of small areas is large.

Many statistical models have been developed during the last years to smooth risks in disease mapping. However, most of these modeling approaches do not take possible local discontinuities into consideration or if they do, they are computationally prohibitive or simply do not work when the number of small areas is large. In this paper, we propose a two-step method to deal with discontinuities and to smooth noisy risks in small areas.

Space-time analysis of ovarian cancer mortality rates by age groups in spanish provinces (1989-2015).

Background: Ovarian cancer is a silent and largely asymptomatic cancer, leading to late diagnosis and worse prognosis. The late-stage detection and low survival rates, makes the study of the space-time evolution of ovarian cancer particularly relevant. In addition, research of this cancer in small areas (like provinces or counties) is still scarce.

Online relative risks/rates estimation in spatial and spatio-temporal disease mapping.

Background And Objective: Spatial and spatio-temporal analyses of count data are crucial in epidemiology and other fields to unveil spatial and spatio-temporal patterns of incidence and/or mortality risks. However, fitting spatial and spatio-temporal models is not easy for non-expert users. The objective of this paper is to present an interactive and user-friendly web application (named SSTCDapp) for the analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal mortality or incidence data.

Two-level resolution of relative risk of dengue disease in a hyperendemic city of Colombia.

Risk maps of dengue disease offer to the public health officers a tool to model disease risk in space and time. We analyzed the geographical distribution of relative incidence risk of dengue disease in a high incidence city from Colombia, and its evolution in time during the period January 2009-December 2015, identifying regional effects at different levels of spatial aggregations. Cases of dengue disease were geocoded and spatially allocated to census sectors, and temporally aggregated by epidemiological periods.

Two-level spatially structured models in spatio-temporal disease mapping.

This work focuses on extending some classical spatio-temporal models in disease mapping. The objective is to present a family of flexible models to analyze real data naturally organized in two different levels of spatial aggregation like municipalities within health areas or provinces, or counties within states. Model fitting and inference will be carried out using integrated nested Laplace approximations.

Temporal evolution of brain cancer incidence in the municipalities of Navarre and the Basque Country, Spain.

Background: Brain cancer incidence rates in Spain are below the European's average. However, there are two regions in the north of the country, Navarre and the Basque Country, ranked among the European regions with the highest incidence rates for both males and females. Our objective here was two-fold.

On fitting spatio-temporal disease mapping models using approximate Bayesian inference.

Spatio-temporal disease mapping comprises a wide range of models used to describe the distribution of a disease in space and its evolution in time. These models have been commonly formulated within a hierarchical Bayesian framework with two main approaches: an empirical Bayes (EB) and a fully Bayes (FB) approach. The EB approach provides point estimates of the parameters relying on the well-known penalized quasi-likelihood (PQL) technique.