Breast Cancer in Michigan

This tutorial explores county-level proportions of breast cancer diagnosed late for white women over the period 1986-2006 in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula for 68 counties. Cancer rate data are aggregated over a 3-year moving window to reduce random fluctuations, and standard deviation is calculated from the total number of cases detected.

You can download this data from the Sample Data page, and read more about the data file contents there.

Click on the "Data" in the main menu and select "Import Data" from the submenu. Browse your computer to where you saved the data files and select Breast Cancer Lower Michigan.shp. You are importing data to create a new dataset. The data is time-independent, so leave the time options to the default.

Click "OK" to complete the import. You will see the imported data in the Data panel. You can expand the dataset to see the different data rows.

Hover over the "FIPS" row, and right-click to reveal a submenu. Hover over "Modify" in the submenu, and then select "Designate as ID".

Click "Designate as ID". You will see that the icon in front of the "FIPS" row has changed and is now at the bottom of the list in the dataset.

Let's bring in some data with time-dependence. Click on the "Data" in the main menu and select "Import Data" from the submenu. Browse your computer to where you saved the data files and select Breast Cancer Lower Michigan.csv. You are going to merge this data file with the existing dataset (Breast Cancer Lower Michigan) already in Vesta.

Since this data has time-dependency and the temporal data is in a column in the *.csv file, select "From column in file", and then select "Year" as the time column.

In ID Options, the existing ID variable is already selected. Select "FIP" in the import file. Vesta uses the "FIP" column to pair the merging data.

Click "OK" to complete the merge import. You will now see the new data rows added to the dataset in the Data panel.

Let's create a map. Click on "Visualizations" in the main menu and select "Map" from the submenu. Select the dataset and the variable, in this case "Rate". The first workspace is selected by default.

Click "OK" to create the map. The map will appear in the workspace. You are welcome to explore the map settings as described in the Map page. Since this data has time-dependency, you can draw the time-slider bar and watch how the rate changes over the years across the state of Michigan.