Statistics Colloquium

Speaker

Dr. Binbing Yu
Associate Director
Non-Clinical Biostatistics
Group MedImmune, LLC.

Title:

Predicting county-level cancer incidence rates and counts in the United States

Abstract:

Many countries, including the USA, publish predicted numbers of cancer incidence and death in current and future years for the whole country and individual states. These predictions provide important information on the cancer burden for cancer control planners, policymakers and the general public. Based on evidence from several empirical studies, the joinpoint model (JPM) has been adopted by the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute to estimate the number of new cancer cases in the USA and in individual states since 2007. Recently, cancer incidences in smaller geographic regions are getting more attention from local policy makers. Direction application of the JPM to county-level cancer incidence data may yield unreliable predictions. To address this issue, we developed a spatial random-effects JPM for county-level cancer incidence data. The proposed model was used to predict both cancer incidence rates and counts at the county level. The standard JPM and the proposed method were compared through a validation study. As an illustration, we predicted county-level prostate cancer incidence rates and counts in 2011 for the 8 counties in Connecticut.