Processing aggregated data: the location of clusters in health data

Spatial information plays an important role in the identification of sources of outbreaks for many different health-related conditions. In the public health domain, as in many other domains, the available data is often aggregated into geographical regions, such as zip codes or municipalities. In this paper we study the problem of finding clusters in spatially aggregated data. Given a subdivision of the plane into regions with two values per region, a case count and a population count, we look for a cluster with maximum density. We model the problem as finding a placement of a given shape R such that the ratio of cases contained in R to people living in R is maximized. We propose two models that differ on how to determine the cases in R, together with several variants and extensions, and give algorithms that solve the problems efficiently.

keywords: Computational Geometry, Geographical Information Analysis

Journal Article (peer-reviewed)

Jun Luo, Kevin Buchin, Maarten Löffler, Maike Buchin, Marc van Kreveld, Rodrigo I. Silveira
Processing aggregated data: the location of clusters in health data
Geoinformatica
16, 3, 497–521, 2012
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10707-011-0143-6

Conference Proceedings (peer-reviewed)

Jun Luo, Kevin Buchin, Maarten Löffler, Maike Buchin, Marc van Kreveld, Rodrigo I. Silveira
Clustering in Aggregated Health Data
Proc. 13th Spatial Data Handling
77–90, 2008
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68566-1_5

Workshop or Poster (weakly reviewed)

Jun Luo, Kevin Buchin, Maarten Löffler, Maike Buchin, Marc van Kreveld, Rodrigo I. Silveira
Clustering in Aggregated Health Data
Proc. 14th Conf. Advanced School for Computing and Imaging
161–168, 2008

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