Disease mapping for spatially semi-continuous data by estimating equations with application to dengue control

Disease mapping is a research field to estimate spatial pattern of disease risks so that areas with elevated risk levels can be identified. The motivation of this article is from a study of dengue fever infection, which causes seasonal epidemics in almost every summer in Taiwan. For analysis of zero-inflated data with spatial correlation and covariates, current methods would either cause a computational burden or miss associations between zero and non-zero responses. In this article, we develop estimating equations for a mixture regression model that accommodates spatial dependence and zero inflation for study of disease propagation. Asymptotic properties for the proposed estimates are established. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate performance of the mixture estimating equations; and a dengue dataset from southern Taiwan is used to illustrate the proposed method.