About Besag and Newell's Statistics

Besag and Newell's method can detect local or global spatial clusters in case and population-at-risk data. It can only be used on point geographies, such as centroids. When you initiate a Besag and Newell analysis, you get both local and global analysis output.

This method scans the data for collections of cases that appear to be unusual clusters. To do so, it centers a circular window on each point location in turn. This window is then expanded to include neighboring regions until the total number of cases in the window reaches a user-specified threshold, k. Then, the population size inside the window is compared to that expected under the expected (average) disease frequency.