Modeling pediatric tumor risks in Florida with conditional autoregressive structures and identifying hot-spots

Abstract

We investigate pediatric tumor incidence data collected by the Florida Association for Pediatric Tumor program using various models commonly used in disease mapping analysis. Particularly, we consider Poisson normal models with various conditional autoregressive structure for spatial dependence, a zero-inflated component to capture excess zero counts and a spatio-temporal model to capture spatial and temporal dependence, together. We found that intrinsic conditional autoregressive model provides the smallest Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) among the models when only spatial dependence is considered. On the other hand, adding an autoregressive structure over time decreases DIC over the model without time dependence component. We adopt weighted ranks squared error loss to identify high risk regions which provides similar results with other researchers who have worked on the same data set (e.g. Zhang et al., 2014;Wang and Rodriguez, 2014). Our results, thus, provide additional statistical support on those identified high risk regions discovered by the other researchers.