An evaluation of the edge effects in disease map modelling

The construction and smoothing of disease maps has been the object of many methodological developments in recent years, but the analysis of edge effects has been a neglected area in spatial epidemiology. This is regrettable since many analyses can be fundamentally altered by the inclusion of edge information in different forms.The aim of this work is to find out how the estimation of the mortality relative risk from a disease near boundaries can be affected by the edge position. Also, the behaviour of a small selection of models for disease mapping is evaluated when different edge conditions exist in the data. One data set is examined and to make the results more rigorous a simulation study was set up where various relative risk patterns (from simple risk gradients to more complex risk structures, including spatial correlation) were simulated.

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