Spatial Disease Cluster Detection: An Application to Childhood Asthma in Manitoba, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cluster detection is an important part of spatial epidemiology because it may help suggest potential factors associated with disease and thus, guide further investigation of the nature of diseases. Many different methods have been proposed to test for disease clusters. The most popular methods for detecting spatial focused clusters are circular spatial scan statistic (CSS), flexible spatial scan statistic (FSS) and Bayesian disease mapping (BYM). The only latter approach is based on rigorous modeling approach. However, the Bayesian inference may depend on the choice of priors. We propose a frequentist approach, which yields to maximum likelihood estimation, to identify potential focused clusters. The proposed approach is based on the recent introduction of the method of data cloning. We can also provide the prediction (and prediction interval) for relative risk values. The advantages of data cloning approach are that the answers are independent of the choice of priors and non-estimable parameters are flagged automatically. We illustrate the proposed approach, and compare with aforementioned approaches, by analyzing a dataset of childhood asthma visits to hospital in the province of Manitoba, Canada, during 2000 Our results showed that the potential clusters are mainly located in the north-central part of the province.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".