Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Modeling in Disease Mapping

Spatio-temporal models are valuable tools for disease mapping and understanding the geographical distribution of diseases and temporal dynamics. Spatio-temporal models have been proven empirically to be very complex and this complexity has led many to oversimply and model the spatial and temporal dependencies independently. Unlike common practice, this study formulated a new spatio-temporal model in a Bayesian hierarchical framework that accounts for spatial and temporal dependencies jointly. The spatial and temporal dependencies were dynamically modelled via the matern exponential covariance function. The temporal aspect was captured by the parameters of the exponential with a first-order autoregressive structure. Inferences about the parameters were obtained via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques and the spatio-temporal maps were obtained by mapping stable posterior means from the specific location and time from the best model that includes the significant risk factors. The model formulated was fitted to both simulation data and Kenya meningitis incidence data from 2013 to 2019 along with two covariates; Gross County Product (GCP) and average rainfall. The study found that both average rainfall and GCP had a significant positive association with meningitis occurrence. Also, regarding geographical distribution, the spatio-temporal maps showed that meningitis is not evenly distributed across the country as some counties reported a high number of cases compared with other counties.