Space-time interactions in Bayesian disease mapping with recent tools: Making things easier for practitioners

Spatio-temporal disease mapping studies the distribution of mortality or incidence risks in space and its evolution in time, and it usually relies on fitting hierarchical Poisson mixed models. These models are complex for practitioners as they generally require adding constraints to correctly identify and interpret the different model terms. However, including constraints may not be straightforward in some recent software packages. This paper focuses on NIMBLE, a library of algorithms that contains among others a configurable system for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In particular, we show how to fit different spatio-temporal disease mapping models with NIMBLE making emphasis on how to include sum-to-zero constraints to solve identifiability issues when including spatio-temporal interactions. Breast cancer mortality data in Spain during the period 1990-2010 is used for illustration purposes. A simulation study is also conducted to compare NIMBLE with R-INLA in terms of parameter estimates and relative risk estimation. The results are very similar but differences are observed in terms of computing time.