Joint Quantile Disease Mapping for Areal Data

Abstract

The statistical analysis based on the quantile method is more comprehensive, flexible, and not sensitive against outliers compared to the mean methods. The study of the joint disease mapping has usually focused on the mean regression. This means they study the correlation or the dependence between the means of the diseases by using standard regression. However, sometimes one disease limits the occurrence of another disease. In this case, the dependence between the two diseases will not be in the means but in the different quantiles; thus, the analyzes will consider a joint disease mapping of high quantile for one disease with low quantile of the other disease. In the proposed joint quantile model, the key idea is to link the diseases with different quantiles and estimate their dependence instead of connecting their means. The various components of this formulation are modeled by using the latent Gaussian model, and the parameters were estimated via R-INLA. Finally, we illustrate the model by analyzing the malaria and G6PD deficiency incidences in 21 African countries.