A comparison of three tests to detect general clustering of a rare disease in Santa Clara County, California
✍ Scribed by Elizabeth G. Hill; Li Ding; Lance A. Waller
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 167 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0277-6715
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Statistical tests to detect clustering of a rare disease investigate whether an observed spatial pattern of cases appears to be due to chance alone. Heterogeneous population density and the geographic structure of the data under consideration complicate the ability to make comparisons of di erent tests. Further, interpretation of test results depends on the nature of the test used and what feature of the data it is designed to detect. With these issues in mind, we compare three recent tests for assessing general clustering among cases where the population is distributed heterogeneously across the study area, namely those of Besag and Newell, Turnbull et al. and Tango. We compare these methods using 1981 incidence data for severe cardiac birth defects from Santa Clara County, California.