I recently returned from the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers, which convened in Seattle in April, 2011. While there I had the opportunity to attend a few of the featured sessions on space-time geography. This special series, with...
The small numbers problem–Part 2
Using persistence in spatial time series as a diagnostic for extreme rates in small areas. In my last blog on the small numbers problem, we found that rates calculated with small denominators (e.g. small at-risk populations) have high variance and we thus have little...
The small numbers problem Part 1: What you see is not necessarily what you get
The ability to quickly create maps of health outcomes such as cancer incidence and mortality in counties, census areas and even Zip codes is now available through websites and data portals. (See for example Atlasplus, State Cancer Profiles, and Cardiovascular Disease,...