Assessing Spatial Disparities: A Bayesian Linear Regression Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian linear regression method with spatial autoregression to detect and analyze spatial health disparities efficiently, addressing statistical challenges in defining and inferring disparities among neighboring regions.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel Bayesian spatial regression model that enables robust detection of spatial disparities with improved computational efficiency.

Findings

Effective detection of spatial disparities demonstrated on US county data.

Model-based approach accelerates analysis compared to traditional methods.

Application to lung cancer mortality data reveals significant regional disparities.

Abstract

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 dependence among health outcomes and seeks to report statistically significant spatial disparities by delineating boundaries that separate neighboring regions with disparate health outcomes. However, there are statistical challenges to appropriately define what constitutes a spatial disparity and to construct robust probabilistic inferences for spatial disparities. We enrich the familiar Bayesian linear regression framework to introduce spatial autoregression and offer model-based detection of spatial disparities. We derive exploitable analytical tractability that considerably accelerates computation. Simulation experiments conducted on a county map of the entire United States demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and we apply our method to a data set from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on age-standardized US county-level estimates of lung cancer mortality rates.