Zero-inflated multiscale models for aggregated small area health data

Abstract

It is our primary focus to study the spatial distribution of disease incidence at different geographical levels. Often, spatial data are available in the form of aggregation at multiple scale levels such as census tract, county, and state. When data are aggregated from a fine (e.g., county) to a coarse (e.g., state) geographical level, there will be loss of information. The problem is more challenging when excessive zeros are available at the fine level. After data aggregation, the excessive zeros at the fine level will be reduced at the coarse level. If we ignore the zero inflation and the aggregation effect, we could get inconsistent risk estimates at the fine and coarse levels. Hence, in this paper, we address those problems using zero-inflated multiscale models that jointly describe the risk variations at different geographical levels. For the excessive zeros at the fine level, we use a zero-inflated convolution model, whereas we consider a regular convolution model for the smoothed data at the coarse level. These methods provide a consistent risk estimate at the fine and coarse levels when high percentages of structural zeros are present in the data.