Abstract Recent advances in the spatial epidemiology literature have extended traditional approaches by including determinant disease factors that allow for non-local smoothing and/or non-spatial smoothing. In this article, two of those approaches are compared and are further extended to areas...

Statisticians along with other scientists have made significant computational advances that enable the estimation of formerly complex statistical models. The Bayesian inference framework combined with Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation methods such as the Gibbs sampler enable the estimation of...

Analysis of area mortality variations and estimation of area life tables raise methodological questions relevant to assessing spatial clustering, and socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. Existing small area analyses of US life expectancy variation generally adopt ad hoc amalgamations of...

This paper develops a joint approach to life and health expectancy based on 2001 UK Census data for limiting long term illness and general health status, and on registered death occurrences in 2001. The model takes account of the interdependence of different outcomes (e.g. ill health and...

Analysis of premature mortality variations via standardized expected years of life lost (SEYLL) measures raises questions about suitable modelling for mortality data, especially when developing SEYLL profiles for areas with small populations. Existing fixed effects estimation methods take no...

Recent analyses seeking to explain variation in area health outcomes often consider the impact on them of latent measures (i.e. unobserved constructs) of population health risk. The latter are typically obtained by forms of multivariate analysis, with a small set of latent constructs derived...

Analysis of geographical patterns of suicide and psychiatric morbidity has demonstrated the impact of latent ecological variables (such as deprivation, rurality). Such latent variables may be derived by conventional multivariate techniques from sets of observed indices (for example, by principal...