Spatiotemporal incidence rate data analysis by nonparametric regression

To monitor the incidence rates of cancers, AIDS, cardiovascular diseases, and other chronic or infectious diseases, some global, national, and regional reporting systems have been built to collect/provide population-based data about the disease incidence. Such databases usually report daily, monthly, or yearly disease incidence numbers at the city, county, state, or country level, and the disease incidence numbers collected at different places and different times are often correlated, with the ones closer in place or time being more correlated. The correlation reflects the impact of various confounding risk factors, such as weather, demographic factors, lifestyles, and other cultural and environmental factors. Because such impact is complicated and challenging to describe, the spatiotemporal (ST) correlation in the observed disease incidence data has complicated ST structure as well. Furthermore, the ST correlation is hidden in the observed data and cannot be observed directly. In the literature, there has been some discussion about ST data modeling. But, the existing methods either impose various restrictive assumptions on the ST correlation that are hard to justify, or ignore partially or entirely the ST correlation. This paper aims to develop a flexible and effective method for ST disease incidence data modeling, using nonparametric local smoothing methods. This method can properly accommodate the ST data correlation. Theoretical justifications and numerical studies show that it works well in practice.